Dynamic Soil Stiffness of Foundations Supported by Layered Half‐Space

Abstract

In the soil–structure interaction (SSI) analysis, dynamic soil stiffness, which is an essential element in analyzing the SSI effect, characterizes the response of the soil base under the foundation. A semi-analytical method is developed to generate dynamic soil stiffness for rigid or flexible foundations supported by layered half-space. An efficient approach for SSI analysis is the substructure method, which considers the structure and soil separately. The total dynamic stiffness of the soil deposit can be obtained based on the boundary conditions. Since Green's influence function is available, only the interface between the foundation and the soil base needs to be considered according to the boundary element method. Floor response spectra of a typical reactor building in a nuclear power plant are generated based on the dynamic soil stiffness given by the proposed method and the commercial software ACS SASSI to examine the proposed method in the application.