An Experimental Study for the Assessment of Numerical Impact Models for Simulating Earthquake Induced Pounding

This paper presents the results of a simple experimental study involving two adjacent single degree of freedom systems that are interacting between each other though pounding when subjected to free vibration. The experimental results are compared with the corresponding numerical results that are computed considering the most common impact models to simulate pounding. The purpose of this study is, through this simple experimental setup, to assess the effectiveness of these widely used force based impact models and provide a better understanding on the effects of the impact parameters values, i.e. the impact stiffness and the coefficient of restitution. The displacement and acceleration time histories are compared for various values of impact parameters and it is observed that the coefficient of restitution value affects significantly the accuracy of the impact model, while the effect of the impact stiffness value is limited on the amplitude of the high spikes of the computed acceleration.