A mixed BEM-FEM formulation for layered soil-superstructure interaction

The analysis of soil-structure interaction is a vast field of interest in the area of civil engineering. Any realistic representation of its behaviour is a complex numerical task owing to its extremely variable mechanical behaviour. In this paper a Boundary Element Method formulation (BEM) for the analysis of SSI is presented in which all dependent interactions (superstructure, infrastructure and the supporting soil) are considered. Thus, the soil is treated as an inhomogeneous continuum supported toy a rigid and adhesive interface and modelled by BEM using the 3D Kelvin solution. The raft foundation and the superstructure are represented by finite shell and 3D frame elements. In order to estimate the accuracy and the potentiality of the proposed numerical formulation, some examples are validated by comparison with similar approaches, and other simulations are presented, to stress the need to analyse the inhomogeneous soil-raft-superstructure system as a whole. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.