Thesis (M.Sc.) - Cairo University - Faculty of Engineering - Department of Civil Engineering

Seismic pounding is one of the phenomena that threaten the structural safety of adjacent buildings. For this reason, the international seismic codes have proposed a minimum distance between such buildings in order to avoid the seismic pounding, but without considering the relative movement between the adjacent buildings, which provides excessive distance in some cases. In this study, the different methods of determination the seismic joint distance have been compared and evaluated considering international code techniques and recent research methods by analysing several case studies of adjacent buildings under the effect of different earthquakes with several hazard levels. First, non-linear static pushover analysis has been performed to calculate the maximum stories displacements; in which the results has been used to determine the required separation distance according to seismic codes and guideline techniques. Then, dynamic time history analysis has been used to obtain the critical separation distances, and compare them with the corresponding results developed from the studied methods

Issued also as CD