Response of open-plane frames on isolated footings to an excitation characterized by a white noise

Abstract

There are occasions, such as multi-storey buildings founded on soft soil, when it becomes necessary to consider the effects of deformability of the foundation. These effects are generally referred to as soil–structure interaction. While the dynamic analysis of framed structures can be made on the basis that the superstructure possesses continuously distributed properties, the analysis is complex and practicable only in the case of very simple structures. More conveniently, a finite element approach can be adopted in which framed structures are discretized into segments and the displacements of the interconnecting nodes constitute the generalized co-ordinates (or dynamic degrees of freedom) of the structure. Kinematic constraints are commonly adopted to reduce the degrees of freedom in order to save computational efforts without significant loss of accuracy.