Earthquake-induced structural pounding phenomenon has been the concern of numerous studies in recent years. This phenomenon may cause severe damage to colliding building elements that may lead to their collapse. As such, the international seismic provisions have proposed a minimum separation distance between adjacent buildings to avoid pounding. However, such provisions have considered only the peak floor drift, but not the relative movement between buildings, which provides excessive gap distance between adjacent buildings in some cases. This study aims to evaluate the accuracy of different methods used in determination of seismic joint distance. In order to identify peak floor drift of analyzed buildings, nonlinear pushover analysis is conducted to four reinforced concrete frames utilizing three earthquake recodes with five peak ground accelerations varies from 0.10 to 0.30g. Then nonlinear time history analysis has been performed considering same seismic records and peak ground accelerations to calculate the critical required gap distances and compare them with the results of the studied methods. The results show that the use of absolute sum rule always provides overestimation of separation distance, while square root rule may provide more accurate separation distance but, in few cases, provides insufficient separation distance between adjacent buildings.
