Site response analysis with two-dimensional numerical discontinuous deformation analysis method

The capability of the numerical discontinuous deformation analysis (DDA) method to perform site response analysis is tested. We begin with modeling one-dimensional shear wave propagation through a stack of horizontal layers and compare the obtained resonance frequency and amplification with results obtained with SHAKE. We use the algorithmic damping in DDA to condition the damping ratio in DDA by changing the time step size and use the same damping ratio in SHAKE to enable meaningful comparisons. We obtain a good agreement between DDA and SHAKE, even though DDA is used with first order approximation and with simply deformable blocks, proving that the original DDA formulation is suitable for modeling one-dimensional wave propagation problems. The ability of DDA to simulate wave propagation through structures is tested by comparing the resonance frequency obtained for a multidrum column when modeling it with DDA and testing it in the field using geophysical site response survey. When the numerical control parameters are properly selected, we obtain a reasonable agreement between DDA and the site response experiment in the field. We find that the choice of the contact spring stiffness, or the numerical penalty parameter, is directly related to the obtained resonance frequency in DDA. The best agreement with the field experiment is obtained with a relatively soft contact spring stiffness of k = (1/25)(E x L) where E and L are the Young's modulus and mean diameter of the drums in the tested column. Copyright (C) 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.