An effective finite element approach for soil-structure analysis in the time-domain

In this study, a complete analysis of soil-structure interaction problems is presented which includes a modelling of the near surrounding of the building (near-field) and a special description of the wave propagation process in larger distances (far-field). In order to reduce the computational effort which can be very high for time domain analysis of wave propagation problems, a special approach based on similarity transformation of the infinite domain on the near-field/far-field interface is applied for the wave radiation of the far-field. The near-field is discretised with standard Finite Elements, which also allows to introduce non-linear material behaviour. In this paper, a new approach to calculate the involved convolution integrals is presented. This approximation in time leads to a dramatically reduced computational effort for long simulation times, while the accuracy of the method is not affected. Finally, some benchmark examples are presented, which are compared to a coupled Finite Element/Boundary Element approach. The results are in excellent agreement with those of the coupled Finite Element/Boundary Element procedure, while the accuracy is not reduced. Furthermore, the presented approach is easy to incorporate in any Finite Element code, so the practical relevance is high.