| Abstract: | The purpose of this paper is to present an accurate and efficient model for use in explicit soil-structure interaction analyses for seismic excitation. The main body of the paper is concerned with the implementation of non-reflecting boundaries at the base and vertical faces of a two-dimensional finite element or finite difference soil mesh. The paper proposes a scheme for implementing viscous dashpots as energy absorbers at the base of the model where the seismic excitation is applied. To achieve this, the form of the seismic input is modified from the conventional accelerogram to a force time history that can be obtained from a standard deconvolution program with very minor modifications. The proposed scheme is also applicable to frequency-domain solutions. For the lateral boundaries, a superposition non-reflecting boundary formulation is recommended. The paper shows how easily the standard formulation can be modified to accommodate a seismic excitation that is assumed to be vertically propagating from the base of the model. An example is presented to demonstrate the accuracy of the proposed model. |
