Assessment of codes recommendations for the evaluation of the seismic gap of buildings founded on different soil types.

Several equations have been proposed in the literature to evaluate the seismic gap preventing earthquake-induced structural pounding, such as the ones based on the absolute sum of the peak displacements (ABS), the square root of the sum of the squares (SRSS), the double difference method (DDC), Australian code and the approach proposed by Naderpour et al. The aim of this paper is to investigate the accuracy of these equations taking the soil type into consideration. Three buildings have been considered, which are 5-storey, 7-storey and 9-storey buildings. Three possible pounding scenarios have been considered between these three buildings which are pounding between 5-storey and 7-storey buildings, pounding between 5-storey and 9-storey buildings and pounding between 7-storey and 9-storey buildings. Five soil types have been taken into account, which are soil types defined in the ASCE 7-10 code (hard rock, rock, very dense soil and soft rock, stiff soil and soft clay soil). The result of this study shows that the ABS and Naderpour formulas are always conservative, but they overestimate the gap. Indeed, the SRSS, DDC and Australian code formulas provide overestimate, accurate and nonconservative results. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]