A new equation for prediction of seismic gap between adjacent buildings located on different soil types

This study aims to investigate the effect of soil type on the minimum separation distance for low and mid-rise reinforced concrete (RC) buildings. 3696 nonlinear time history analyses were carried out using 56 different building pairs located on 3 different soil types and 66 different earthquake records. The minimum required seismic gap distances obtained from the analysis results were compared with the minimum seismic gap estimates of DDC and simplified method in the literature. The required gap distances obtained for different soil types were examined and a new equation for modification coefficient is proposed to improve the simplified method. The outcomes show that the proposed new equation provides the required seismic gap distance values for all soil types better than the Double Difference Combination (known as DDC) method estimates. © 2022 Elsevier Ltd