Dynamic soil-structure interaction under complex soil environment

The dynamic soil-structure interaction (SSI) analysis is of great significance to the earthquake safety evaluation of infrastructures, such as dams, bridges, nuclear power structures, etc. The state of the art and the current design practice of SSI analysis are briefly reviewed. It is worth to mention that after the 2011 accident of Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant in Japan, the international demand for the earthquake safety of nuclear power structures has been raised. Hence, it is imperative to develop more advanced appropriate computational models for the safety evaluation of the important structures. For this purpose, a novel SSI analysis model under complex soil environment is proposed so that the influences of the inhomogeneities appearing in the near field of the structure including the layering of the half-space, the embedment of the foundation, the layout level of the foundation base, the existence of adjacent structures, the nearly soft geologic inclusions, the irregular interfaces between the layers can be easily and conveniently taken into consideration without additional effort. As a result, the computation can be more accurate and efficient. Numerical examples are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.