Investigation of adequacy of adjacent building seismic joints in Tehran City corresponding to seismic hazard analysis, site effects and nonlinear dynamic analysis

The topic of pounding of adjacent structures has greatly attracted the attention of researchers in recent years. Among the observed damages due to the earthquake, one could refer to those damages induced by pounding of the adjacent structures which is a prevalent phenomenon. The reason for this issue is the lack of separation joint or its inadequacy between two adjacent buildings. When an earthquake occurs, difference in the structures' frequencies would result in difference in their reaction relative to the ground acceleration and pounding would take place. In this article the effects of site soil type, structure type, its height and distance from the fault on the separation joint for the steel and reinforced concrete moment resisting buildings with 3, 5, 8 and 12 stories are investigated. The structural models are first designed by structural design software and then are analyzed under various time histories using Seismostruct software. The obtained results show that the highest hazard risks corresponding to collision between the adjacent buildings belong to areas near the faults located on soft soil types and collision of two buildings with different types is the most severe collision. Different conditions have been discussed in this paper and based on the results, some editions to criteria of seismic design code of Iran has been proposed considering to distance to active faults, soil conditions and type of structure.