UCLA Civil and Environmental Engineering

The paper evaluates the radiation damping associated with shallow foundations sitting on linear or nonlinear soil medium. The study was motivated by the need to develop macroscopic foundation models that can realistically capture the nonlinear behaviour and energy dissipation mechanism of shallow foundations. Such model is essential to simulate the complex behaviour of structure components (e.g. shear walls, columns etc.) sitting on flexible foundations due to soil-structure interaction effects. In this study, the dynamic response of an infinitely long strip foundation resting on an elastic and inelastic half-space is investigated. The numerical analysis results presented here reveal that dynamic responses of shallow foundations strongly depend on amplitude and frequency of the input motion. In particular, the radiation damping of the system is affected by soil nonlinearity, foundation geometry and excitation frequency. The yielding of soil reduces the energy dissipation through the out going waves. As a result, the radiation damping of nonlinear soil medium is significantly lower than the elastic soil counterpart. The effects of initial elastic stiffness, yielding stress and excitation amplitude are incorporated in a nonlinearity indicator, which has shown strong correspondence to the radiation damping of the system.