Effect of poorly-compacted backfill around embedded foundations on building seismic response

Abstract

Many building foundations are embedded, however it is not easy to compact the backfill around the foundation especially for the deeply embedded ones. The soil condition around the embedded foundation may affect the seismic response of a building due to the weak contact between the soil and the foundation. In this paper, the response accelerations in the short-period range and at the period of 1 second (in the long-period range) for a seismic design spectrum specified in the IBC design code were compared considering perfect and poor backfills to investigate the effect of backfill compaction around the embedded foundation. An in-house finite-element software (P3DASS) which has the capability of horizontal pseudo-3D seismic analysis with linear soil layers was used to perform the seismic analyses of the structure-soil system with an embedded foundation. Seismic analyses were carried out with 7 bedrock earthquake records provided by the Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research Center (PEER), scaling the peak ground accelerations to 0.1 g. The results indicate that the poor backfill is not detrimental to the seismic response of a building, if the foundation is not embedded deeply in the soft soil. However, it is necessary to perform the seismic analysis for the structure-soil system embedded deeply in the soft soil to check the seismic resonance due to the soft soil layer beneath the foundation, and to compact the backfill as well as possible.