Vibrations of Footings on Zoned Viscoelastic Soils

Abstract

Most finite element solutions of soil‐structure interaction problems assume a horizontally layered soil that unavoidably extends to infinity and is bounded at the bottom by a bedrock. In this paper, a model consisting of a soil deposit included in a viscoelastic half‐space is used to analyze numerically the effects of the shape of the soil deposit and the existence of a compliant bedrock on the dynamic compliances of strip footings. The soil deposit is assumed to be semielliptical and in order to achieve a parametric study several aspect ratios going from infinity (boundless horizontal layer) to one (semi‐circle) are considered. The rigidity of the half‐space is given several values including infinity (rigid bedrock). The foundation compliances are computed using a frequency domain formulation of the Boundary Element Method for zoned viscoelastic media.