Complex soil-structure interaction issues

• Applicant: Professor Dr.-Ing. Christoph Butenweg, since 10/2011
• Subject Area: Structural Engineering, Building Informatics and Construction Operation
• Term: from 2010 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 164875965

The project addresses the topic of complex soil-structure interaction phenomena including structure-soilstructure interaction, a topic of considerable scientific and practical importance. Typical applications to be addressed concern the seismic safety of infrastructures and the behavior of industrial facilities subject to blast loads (e.g. from possible conflagration of nearby LNG tanks) where adjacent structures interact via the soil. In the past decades there has been significant progress in the development of sophisticated numerical methods, but a homogeneous half-space has been tacitly assumed in most of the actually available programs, which may lead to unreliable results for markedly heterogeneous soil. The project addresses two types of realistic soil configurations: The first type is stratified soil, using the precise integration method combined with the extended Wittrick-Williams algorithm for solution in the frequency-wavenumber domain. The second type is complex soil with inclusions or intercalations in the near-field and certain far-field inhomogeneities such as variable elastic moduli as functions of depth. The scaled boundary element method with doubly asymptotic continued fractions will be employed. The influence of complex soil will be studied systematically and the results compared with insitu vibration tests. On that basis, simplified SSI models for engineering practice will be developed with the most important factors of SSI included. Structure-soil-structure interaction caused by blast loading will be specifically addressed, with coupled FEM/BEM formulations employed. Comparisons between the results obtained by the consistent approaches and those of simplified models will be carried out with the aim of verification and improvement of the latter so they can serve for preliminary evaluations in engineering practice. In addition, insitu vibration tests of a subway are planned for verifying the numerical results as well as investigating the influence of simplification in measurement of soil parameters based on which probabilistic analysis of soil parameters will be conducted.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: China
• Participating Person: Professor Gao Lin
• Ehemaliger Antragsteller: Professor Dr.-Ing. Konstantin Meskouris, from 10/2010 until 10/2011