A Macro-element for Modeling the Non-linear Interaction of Soil-shallow Foundation under Seismic Loading

This paper presents a macro-element for simulating the seismic behavior of the soil- shallow foundation interaction. The overall behavior in the soil and at the interface is replaced by a macro-element located at the base of the superstructure. The element reproduces the irreversible elastoplastic soil behavior (material non-linearity) and the foundation uplift (geometric non-linearity) at the soil- foundation interface. This new macro-element model with three degrees-of-freedom describes the force-displacement behavior of the footing center. The single element is restrained by the system of equivalent springs and dashpots. The footing is considered as a rigid body. It is solved by a suitable Newmark time integration scheme and implemented in Matlab to simulate the nonlinear behavior of soil-shallow foundation interaction under seismic loading. A reduce scaled soil-foundation system has been tested on a shaking table at the University of Transport and Communications, Hanoi, Vietnam. Five series of earthquake motions were used with maximum acceleration increased from 0.5  to 2.5 . The comparison of numerical results obtained from the simulation and experimentations shows the satisfactory agreement of the model. The proposed macro-element can be used to predict the seismic behavior of a wider variety of configurations.

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