SOIL-RAFT FOUNDATION-STRUCTURE INTERACTION EFFECTS ON SEISMIC PERFORMANCE OF MULTI-STORY MRF BUILDINGS

Abstract

Recent studies show that the effects of Soil Structure Interaction (SSI) may be detrimental to the seismic response of structure and neglecting SSI in analysis may lead to un-conservative design. Despite this, the conventional design procedure usually involves assumption of fixity at the base of foundation neglecting the flexibility of the foundation, the compressibility of soil mass and consequently the effect of foundation settlement on further redistribution of bending moment and shear force demands. The effects of SSI are analyzed for typical multi-story building resting on raft foundation. Three methods of analysis are used for seismic demands evaluation of the target moment resistant frame buildings: equivalent static load (ESL); response spectrum (RS) methods and nonlinear time history (TH) analysis with suit of nine time history records. Three-dimensional Finite Element (FE) model is constructed to analyze the effects of different soil conditions and number of stories on the vibration characteristics and seismic response demands of building structures. Numerical results obtained using soil structure interaction model conditions are compared to those corresponding to fixed-base support conditions. The peak responses of story shear, story moment, story displacement, story drift, moments at beam ends, as well as force of inner columns are analyzed.