Assessment of seismic vulnerability of RC frames at the end-of-row of buildings with floor-to-floor alignment using multi-strips analysis MSA

During earthquakes’ excitation, adjacent buildings start vibrating out of phase (in different directions) leading to collisions with each other causing severe damage in a phenomenon known as structural pounding. The proposed study analyses the pounding effects for several case studies representing one of the critical pounding configurations found in the Egyptian buildings taxonomy which is building at the end-of-row of buildings. The multi-strip analysis approach (MSA) using fifty-ground motion records has been adopted to reduce the computational effort required for probabilistic performance assessment. The obtained structural performances of the studied cases, expressed in the form of fragility functions, were compared with the corresponding reference cases (i.e., structures with no adjacent buildings). The results provide insights into the type of failure mechanism that contributes to the global collapse of the studied cases. Fragility functions are also developed for different limit states based on these results to extract further conclusions regarding the overall influence of pounding. Results highlight the main differences between the expected performance of the pounding-involved cases compared to the reference cases. Finally, results indicate the relevance of the pounding effect on the overall performance of the considered cases therefore large-scale seismic risk assessment studies should consider fragility functions accounting for different pounding configurations