Numerical Evaluation of Buried Wave Barriers Performance

Abstract

Ground-borne vibrations caused by construction activities, highway and railway traffic may disturb adjacent structures and sensitive machines. Thus, studies on isolation of this type of vibrations have accelerated in recent years. This paper aims to develop a plain strain 2D finite element model (FEM) to investigate the use of open and buried trenches in mitigating the unfavorable vibrations from a concrete machine foundation subjected to sinusoidal harmonic load. The finite element model is validated using a conducted filed test on open and infilled trenches. Then, the FEM model was used to conduct a parametric study to investigate the effect of the barrier depth and buried depth on the screening effectiveness of the buried infilled trenches. Special cases, i.e., buried dual and trapezoidal trenches, were also considered to improve the effectiveness of infilled buried trenches. The results of this study show that the open trench is the optimum wave barrier and increasing the burial depth would lead to a significant reduction in the screening effectiveness of buried trenches. However, buried trapezoidal trenches could significantly increase the performance of buried trenches by 20% compared to a single rectangular buried trench. Similarly, double buried trenches improved the mitigation capacity of buried trenches by 25% compared to a single rectangular buried trench.