Analysis of Soil-Structure Interaction Considering Complicated Soil Profile

The effect of soil-structure interaction (SSI) is an important consideration and cannot be neglected in the seismic design of structures on soft soil. Various methods have been developed to consider SSI effects and are currently being used. However, most of the approaches including a general finite element method cannot appropriately consider the properties and characteristics of the sites with complicated soil profiles. To overcome these difficulties, this paper presents soil-structure interaction analysis method, which can consider precisely complicated soil profiles by adopting an unaligned mesh generation approach. This approach has the advantages of rapid generation of structured internal meshes and leads to regular and precise stiffness matrix. The applicability of the proposed method is validated through several numerical examples and the influence of various properties and characteristics of soil sites on the response is investigated.