Impact of TMDI on pounding mitigation of insufficiently separated buildings exposed to earthquakes with varying frequencies

Sever damages or even total collapses were recorded due to collisions between insufficiently separated neighboring structures exposed to seismic forces. This research article aims to examine the effectiveness of Tuned Mass Damper-Inerter (TMDI) systems in mitigating seismic pounding between insufficiently separated buildings subjected to earthquakes of varying frequencies as low, medium, and high. The effectiveness of TMDI is examined for pounding mitigation of neighboring buildings through different scenarios, involving uncontrolled adjacent buildings, attaching one building with a TMDI system, and both of the adjacent buildings are controlled by TDMI. The governing equations of motion for the considered scenarios of adjacent buildings modelled as single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) systems to seismic force are formulated. The nonlinear viscoelastic model is incorporated to simulate the generated forces during collisions under earthquake motions scaled to have the same peak ground acceleration (PGA) level. The TMDI’s optimal design parameters are determined by solving a constrained optimization problem employing an evolutionary algorithm to minimize the displacement response. The obtained numerical results clearly indicate that, TMDI is an effective mechanism in controlling the induced displacements and mitigating the pounding forces between insufficiently separated buildings subjected to earthquake motions of different frequency contents. Further, TMDI is substantially effective in minimizing the Interaction when both buildings are equipped with the system. In addition, the frequency content of the applied earthquake records is an important parameter in dictating the response reduction.