Seismic analysis of soil-structure interaction: Experimentation and modeling

This paper presents a simplified modelling strategy to simulate the soil-foundation-structure interaction under seismic loadings. The interaction of soil and structure is modeled by a macro-element with the coupling of geometric and material non-linearities. The model consists of 4 degrees of freedom in which the superstructure is lumped as a single degree of freedom (DOF) while the soil-foundation is modeled by 3 DOFs. The dynamic equilibrium equations are solved by a Newmark time integration scheme and implemented in Matlab. To verify the numerical model, an experimental investigation based on shaking table method has been conducted in the present study. Five series of earthquake motions with maximum acceleration increased from 0.1 m/s(2) to 1.4 m/s(2) were applied and the results of time-dependent accelerations and displacements are extracted. Based on the result comparisons, it is found that the numerical results were well validated against the experimental results.