Soil structure interaction

About: Soil structure interaction is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 3653 publications have been published within this topic receiving 48890 citations.

Impedances of soil layer with boundary zone

Abstract: When calculating dynamic response of embedded foundations or piles, impedances (stiffness and damping) of the adjacent soil are needed. To account approximately for soil nonlinearity under high strain, contact deficiencies and disturbances caused by foundation installation, a cylindrical annulus of softer soil around the foundation is used. The soil properties in this weakened boundary zone differ from those of the outer zone but both regions are assumed to be homogeneous. The mass of the cylindrical annulus can be either neglected or accounted for. If this mass is considered, a seemingly more accurate approach, wave reflections from the interface between the two media can occur resulting in marked undulations of the impedances with regard to frequency and, possibly, in negative stiffness. It is the purpose of the paper to show that such undulations are unrealistic and that the impedances featuring them can be less suitable for practical application than those obtained neglecting the mass of the inner zone.

SPH-based numerical simulations for large deformation of geomaterial considering soil-structure interaction

Abstract: The finite element method (FEM) is often used as the conventional method in computational geomechanics. However, dealing with the large deformation and failure is generally a difficult task for FEM since this method is suffered from grid distortions. In order to resolve this problem, the development of smoothed particle hydrodynamics (SPH) to simulate large deformation and failure of geomaterials has been presented recently by our group (Bui et al., 2007). As an application of our proposed method to geotechnical engineering, the interaction between soil and solid structure is modelled herein by the SPH method. The Drucker-Prager model with non-associated plastic flow rule is implemented into the SPH-code to describe the elasto-plastic soil behaviour while the solid structure is simulated as an elastic-perfectly plastic material using the Von-Mises yield criterion. The contact between soil and solid structure is modelled by means of coupling condition associated with a Lennard-Jones repulsive force between the two phases. The method is then applied to simulate slope failure and slope with reinforcing pile. Numerical results show that the gross discontinuities failure of geomaterial can be simulated very well through SPH, and the proposed soil-structure interaction algorithm works well in the SPH framework. This suggests that SPH can be applied to model soil-structure interaction in geomechanics.