VIBRATIONAL BUFFETING OUTCOMES IN STRUCTURES

Major vibrational events during the past decade such as those that have occurred in Northridge, Imperial Valley (May 18, 1940), California (1994), Kobe, Japan (1995), Turkey (1999), Taiwan (1999) and Bhuj, Central Western India (2001) have continued to demonstrate the destructive power of earthquakes, with destruction of engineered structures, bridges, industrial and port facilities as well as giving rise to great economic losses. Among the possible structural damages, vibrational induced buffeting has been commonly observed in several earthquakes. As a result, a parametric study on structures buffeting response as well as proper vibrational hazard mitigation practice for adjacent structures is carried out. Therefore, the needs to

improve vibrational performance of the built environment through the development of performance-oriented procedures have been developed. To estimate the vibrational demands, nonlinearities in the structure are to be considered when the structure enters into inelastic range during devastating earthquakes. Despite the increase in the accuracy and efficiency of the computational tools related to dynamic inelastic analysis, engineers tend to adopt simplified non-linear static procedures instead of rigorous non-linear dynamic analysis when evaluating vibrational demands. This is due to the problems related to its complexities and suitability for practical design applications. The push over analysis is a static, nonlinear procedure that can be used to estimate the

dynamic needs imposed on a structure by earthquake ground motions. This project entitled

“Vibrational Buffeting Effects in Structures.” aims at studying vibrational gap between adjacent structures by dynamic and pushover analysis in SAP2000. A parametric study is conducted to investigate the minimum vibrational buffeting gap between two adjacent structures by response Spectrum analysis for medium soil and Elcentro Earthquake recorded excitation are used for input in the dynamic analysis on different models.. The effect of impact is studied using linear and nonlinear contact force on models for different separation distances and compared with nominal model without buffeting consideration. Buffeting produces acceleration and shear at various story levels that are greater than those obtained from the no buffeting case, while the peak drift depends on the input excitation characteristics. Also, increasing gap width is likely to be effective when the separation is sufficiently wide practically to eliminate contact. The results of pushover analysis viz. pushover curves and capacity spectrum for three different lateral load patterns are observed to study the effect of different lateral load pattern on the structural displacement to find out minimum vibrational gap between structures.