Response analysis of structures including effects of soil-structure interaction

The objective of the study is to determine the structural response to external force and earthquake excitations with consideration of soil-structure interaction. The physical model concerned herein is an N-story building on a rigid or flexible foundation embedded in a layered soil medium. In this substructure approach, the soil medium and the structure are treated as one-dimensional waveguides and their motions are characterized as wave scattering. To include effects of soil-structure interaction, the foundation response is expressed as a summation of influence functions, which are defined as the response to a simple stress distribution over the contact surface between the soil and foundation. The analysis, therefore, is carried out without solving integral equations. The coupling effect is recovered by using equilibrium, compatibility and reciprocal conditions. As a result, the structural response solution is expressed in terms of parameters of a seismic source and external excitations, and can be used in a statistical analysis if uncertainties of these parameters are taken into account.