Existing Building Drift for New Expansion Joint
Existing Building Drift for New Expansion Joint
(OP)
Designing a building addition in New York State. The addition will be structurally separate. The existing 2 story building does not have any obvious lateral resistance shown in existing drawings. Only thought is the exterior masonry walls help provide lateral resistance. How do I approximate a building drift to calculate the required expansion joint size?






RE: Existing Building Drift for New Expansion Joint
Or you can push test it! stiffness is equal to force / deflection
RE: Existing Building Drift for New Expansion Joint
1) Attempt to calculate the drift of the adjacent building. I almost never see this done in any rigorous fashion as folks rarely have the fee for it.
2) Assume that the existing building was designed to meet the drift limitations of its day. As always, assumptions can be dangerous.
While it's reasonable to assume that an older building may have already seen its design wind force, that will rarely be the case for seismic loads. The vast majority of buildings will be utterly untested seismically.
The greatest trick that bond stress ever pulled was convincing the world it didn't exist.