Pounding Effect of Adjacent Buildings during Earthquake in Iraq

In addition to structural destruction due to earthquakes structures and their components suffered additional destruction due to pounding. Building Pounding is defined as collision of adjacent buildings when earthquakes take place and buildings show lateral movement. In this study, different cases of typical 2-dimensional adjacent multi-story reinforced concrete buildingsusually constructed in Iraqi major cities commercial centers. will be considered to study the effects due to buildings pounding when subjected to actual earthquake took place in Iraq ( like Ail Al-Gharbee ground-motion). Buildings with different height, story levels and gaps are analyzed using finite element program SAP 2000 version 16 software. The results showed that when there is no gap between adjacent buildings, the pounding forces effect increases by about (5 % to 10 %) of pounding forces when there is gap between adjacent buildings and it decreases when adjacent buildings have higher number of floors