Site Response, Soil-Structure Interaction and Structure-Soil-Structure Interaction for Performance Assessment of Buildings and Nuclear Structures

Keywords: Site response, Soil-structure interaction, Structure-soil-structure interaction, Centrifuge testing, Performance-based earthquake engineering

Abstract: This report presents three studies that share the common goal of better understanding the phenomena of site response, soil-structure interaction and structure-soil-structure interaction, and advancing the numerical tools that simulate these phenomena. The first two studies involve an assessment of the industry-standard frequency-domain and time-domain programs used for site-response and soil-structure interaction analyses. The more recently developed nonlinear time-domain methods are benchmarked against the traditionally used frequency-domain methods for low-intensity ground shaking, and their predictions are compared for higher intensity shaking. The results are used to provide practical guidelines for the usage of these programs. The third study involves the examination of structure-soil-structure interaction effects in two of the City Block centrifuge experiments through analysis of experimental data and numerical simulations. The numerical simulations are performed using the frequency- and time-domain programs assessed in the first two studies and supplement the experimental data by providing a better insight into the phenomenon of structure-soil-structure interaction.