Abstract: “The emerging concept of performance based design relies on a careful consideration of all aspects involved in structural analysis. One of these aspects of structural analysis involves soil-structure interaction (SSI). Current research has focussed on analysing the beneficial and sometimes detrimental effects of SSI to the performance of isolated structures. However, real structures are built in clusters (city blocks) and the seismic performance of one building influences the performance of surrounding buildings. To improve understanding of this effect, a number of building clusters with varying parameters are taken and their peak responses with varying frequencies have been studied in this paper. These results show that cluster effect is significant and the resulting response amplification in certain buildings of the cluster may justify structural retrofitting in existing buildings.”

Keywords: soil-structure interaction, seismic response, response amplification, site effect