Numerical simulations of ordinary buildings with soil-structure interaction

Abstract eng:
Soil-Structure Interaction (SSI) plays a significant role during seismic excitations for structures. Many researchers have assessed its importance for strategic structures such as bridges, hospitals, nuclear plants, neglecting its application to ordinary buildings. The present study aims at considering a 3D numerical simulation of a soil-structure system for these kind of structures, applying the opensource computational interface OpenSeesPL, implemented within the FE code OpenSees. This framework is capable of performing non-linear dynamic analyses and applying user-defined materials to model the soil. It is powerful in modeling the interface and boundary conditions that are of extreme importance in SSI problems. In particular, numerical simulations aims at performing the mutual behaviour of soil and structural deformability in order to assess safety and cost reduction. Therefore, this study can be considered one of the relatively few attempts to evaluate the necessity to consider Soil-Structure Interaction (SSI) in cases that actually are underestimated. 1  BACKGROUND Soil-Structure Interaction (SSI) takes into account the effects of the ground on the response of a structural system. In particular, fixed conditions can consistently undervalue effects due to Soil-Structure Interaction (SSI), especially with dynamic interaction. When ordinary buildings are considered, many codes suggest to neglect SSI. Nevertheless, there is some case where SSI is shown to be non-conservative for safety and cost reduction, especially in bridge and strategic building arena. The present study aims to consider a 3D numerical simulation of a soil-structure system applied to an ordinary building. A case study representing a four story concrete structure on a deformable soil has been considered. The majority of publications study SSI simply introducing springs, dashpots and artificial masses in the interface between the structure and the soil. This approach is generally accepted since modeling SSI is a challenging problem for numerical simulations. However, it could be insufficiently detailed in order to model  the complexity of the problem. In particular, system response is directly connected with the mutual dynamic characteristics (natural frequencies) and thus with structural mass and stiffness, soil shear velocity and layer depth. In particular, Kramer (1996) shows that SSI depends on several dimensionless parameters, such as stiffness ratio, slenderness ratio and mass ratio.

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