Dynamic soil stiffnesses at side of embedded structures with rectangular base

Abstract

Soil behavior at the side of an embedded structure with rectangular base area is formulated. The soil medium is idealized as a stack of horizontal sheets interconnected by distributed vertical springs. Each sheet is made of a previously proposed column-spring system. The computed results indicate that, at frequencies higher than the fundamental natural frequency of the soil medium, the vertical springs can be eliminated and each sheet can be treated as an independent sheet in the plane strain condition. This approximation and Galerkin's method for weighted residuals lead to very simple expressions for the soil stiffnesses per depth at the side of a structure with rectangular cross section. The formulations developed are computationally very convenient and confirmed to produce results close to those computed by a far more rigorous method. The dynamic soil stiffnesses at the side of a structure are computed for various cases. The dynamic response analyses of partially embedded structures are presented to demonstrate the application of the approach and formulations developed.