Boundary differential equation method: Simplified dynamic soil stiffnesses for embedded rigid foundations

Abstract

With a simplified model and Galerkin's weighted residual procedure, two simple differential equations of dynamic behavior of a bounded rectangular medium are established along the boundaries in the x- and y-direction in the medium. Solutions of these equations yield closed form expressions of soil stiffnesses for various cases of a partially embedded rigid foundation, including the stiffnesses per depth of foundation with rectangular base area and the stifnesses of strip foundation. The developed procedure provides the definition of the weight functions, which are used in Galerkin's method for weighted residual. In addition to these weight functions, their conjugators are also suitable for weight functions. When the soil depth is finite, the original weight functions fail to produce physically meaningful results in some frequency range but the conjugators do not fail at any frequencies. The developed equations to compute soil stiffnesses for embedded foundations are simple yet capable of calculating the responses close to those computed by the much more elaborated finite element method. © 2002 Published by Elsevier Science Ltd.