The effects of different soil types and seismic locations on separation distances between low-and mid-rise adjacent buildings

This study investigates the minimum separation distance required to prevent collision between adjacent reinforced concrete buildings of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10 floors designed according to the 2018 Turkish Earthquake Code (TEC-2018). It was assumed that the 56 different binary building models were built on three different seismic locations and three different soil types. 11 different earthquake record pairs (22 records) compatible with TBEC-2018 for 9 different soil type and location combination (ZC, ZD and ZE soil types and Denizli, Kocaeli and Adana locations) were used to perform a total of 11088 nonlinear dynamic analyses to obtain the required separation distance. The obtained distances were compared to the distance required using TEC-2018. The outcomes indicate that the separation distance calculated based on the building height is not adequate for different soil types and seismic locations. Four different simple approaches were proposed within the scope of this study to estimate the required seismic separation distance between adjacent buildings. Depending on the building height, period ratio of adjacent buildings, location and soil type parameters, the separation distance can be calculated easily and conveniently using the suggested approaches without the need for static analysis.