An efficient method for the dynamic interaction of open structure-foundation systems

Abstract

The structure-foundation system is transformed from an original open system into an approximately hermetic system through a viscous-spring artificial boundary. In addition, the seismic wave scattering problem is changed to a wave source problem by employing an equivalent seismic wave input method. Subsequently, the modal superposition method is adopted to solve the approximated hermetic system. This procedure is highly efficient in analyzing dynamic structure-foundation interaction problems in the time domain. Two numerical examples are presented to illustrate the characteristics of the proposed method: one is a wave source problem in 2-dimensions (2-D) elastic semi-infinite space, and the other is a dynamic structure-foundation interaction problem under seismic excitations. Compared with the traditional direct step-by-step integration method, the proposed method, with a sufficient number of modes included, can significantly reduce the computational time with almost the same precision. The results also indicate that the proposed method is more advantageous for solving large structure-foundation systems of many degrees of freedom.