Chaotic Seismic Torsional Pounding Between Two Single-Story Asymmetric Towers

Abstract eng:
Adjacent buildings are subjected to pounding hazard during earthquakes when there are inadequate separation distances. Pounding phenomena have been observed during past major earthquakes, including recent M8.0 Wenchuan Earthquake on May 12, 2008, and have been identified as one of the main causes of structural damages of buildings. However, most of actual poundings are likely to be eccentric due to asymmetric structural plans or non-constant gaps between adjacent buildings. Seismic torsional pounding is a highly nonlinear phenomenon in nature. In this study, the nonlinear Hertz contact law was adopted to simulate impacts between two single-story asymmetric towers. The numerical simulation results show that torsional pounding tends to be much more complex than translational pounding, and most of torsional impacts are chaotic. Group periodic pounding (i.e. a group of non-periodic impacts repeating themselves periodically) observed in shaking table tests by Chau et al. (2003) was replicated numerically for the first time by incorporating torsional responses, which cannot be explained in numerical simulations for translational pounding alone.

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