Dynamic soil-structure interaction: pile foundations and retaining structures
Creators: name: Wu, Guoxi
Publisher: name: University of British Columbia
Year: 2009

description: This thesis deals with two important topics in soil-structure interaction: seismic earth pressures against rigid walls and the seismic response of pile foundations. These two disparate problems are linked by a common method of solution which is an approximation to the response of the half-space, either linear or non-linear. The approximate formulation permits analytical solutions against rigid walls when the backfill is uniform and elastic. The solution agrees very closely with an existing exact solution. For elastic non-homogeneous backfills and for non-linear soil response the approximate formulation is expressed using the finite element method. An efficient computer program SPAW has been developed to determine dynamic thrusts and moments against rigid walls for arbitrary non-homogeneous soil layers. Results of analyses show that the peak dynamic thrusts are larger for a uniform soil profile than when the shear modulus of the soil varies linearly or parabolically with depth. The program SPAW also possesses the ability of modelling the effect of soil non-linearity on dynamic thrusts. Studies showed that an increase of peak dynamic thrust may be expected due to soil non-linearity, compared with results from a linear elastic analysis. A quasi-3D finite element method of analysis has been proposed to determine dynamic response of pile foundations subjected to horizontal loading. A computer program PlLIMP has been developed for the analyses of elastic response of pile foundations including the determination of pile impedances as a function of frequency. The analysis is conducted in the frequency domain. The program can analyze single piles and pile groups in arbitrary non-homogeneous soil layers. Another quasi-3D finite element computer program PILE3D has been developed for the analysis of non-linear response of pile foundations in the time domain. The program is suitable of dynamic analyses of single piles and pile groups. The soil non-linearity during shaking is modelled using a modified equivalent linear method. Yielding of the soil is taken into account and there is a no-tension option controlling the analysis. The proposed quasi-3D model has been validated using the elastic solutions from Kaynia and Kausel (1982), Novak and Nogami (1977) and Novak (1974), Fan et al. (1991), data from full scale vibration tests of a single pile and a 6-pile group, and data from centrifuge tests of a single pile and a 2x2 pile group under strong shaking from simulated earthquake. Excellent results have been obtained using the proposed method. Time-dependent variations of dynamic impedances of pile foundations during shaking have been evaluated for the model pile foundations used in the centrifuge tests. The analyses quantify the reduction in the stiffnesses of the pile foundations with the increased level of shaking. The translational stiffness Ƙѵѵ decreases the most during strong shaking; the rotational stiffness Ƙθθ decreases the least. However, the damping of pile foundations increases with the level of shaking.