Boundary reaction method for nonlinear analysis of soil–structure interaction under earthquake loads

Abstract

This paper presents a boundary reaction method (BRM) for nonlinear time domain analysis of soil–structure interaction (SSI) under incident seismic waves. The BRM is a hybrid frequency–time domain method, but it removes global iterations between frequency and time domain analyses commonly required in the hybrid approach, so that it operates as a two-step uncoupled method. Specifically, the nonlinear SSI system is represented as a simple summation of two substructures as follows: (I) wave scattering substructure subjected to incident seismic waves to calculate boundary reaction forces on the fixed interface boundary between a finite nonlinear structure-soil body and an unbounded linear domain; and (II) wave radiation substructure subjected to the boundary reaction forces in which the nonlinearities can be considered. The nonlinear responses in the structure–soil body can be obtained by solving the radiation problem in the time domain using a general-purpose nonlinear finite element code that can simulate absorbing boundary conditions, while the boundary reaction forces can be easily calculated by solving the linear scattering problem by means of a standard frequency domain SSI code. The BRM is verified by comparing the numerical results obtained by the proposed BRM and the conventional frequency-domain SSI analysis for an equivalent linear SSI system. Finally, the BRM is applied to the nonlinear time-domain seismic analysis of a base-isolated nuclear power plant structure supported by a layered soil medium. The numerical results showed that the proposed method is very effective for nonlinear time-domain SSI analyses of nonlinear structure-soil system subjected to earthquake loadings.