Abstract This work investigates the transient response of bar structures interacting with three-dimensional soil profiles. The structures are modeled by the Finite Element Method (FEM) and the soil models are described by a three-dimensional Boundary Element Formulation (BEM) in the frequency domain. A classic modal analysis is performed on the structure in terms of the relative displacements with respect to the soil. The dynamic response of the structure is coupled to the soil response, aiming to obtain frequency response functions (FRFs) of the soil-structure system. A new set of modal parameters are extracted from the FRFs of the coupled system. These new parameters allow for the synthesis of a set of orthogonal differential equations in the time domain. These equations are integrated by a classical numerical scheme resulting in the transient response of the structure interacting with the supporting soil. It is shown that for soil profiles that present eigenfrequencies, the system modal basis must be expanded to properly include the soil dynamics. The cases of a structure interacting with a homogeneous half-space and with a horizontal layer over a rigid stratum are considered. The results presented for both soil models are consistent. threedimensional three dimensional FEM (FEM BEM (BEM domain (FRFs soilstructure eigenfrequencies dynamics halfspace half space considered consistent

Abstract This article presents novel non-singular influence functions for homogeneous media. These solutions are displacement and stress fields of a three-dimensional, isotropic full-space under time-harmonic vertical and horizontal loads, which can be used within the framework of boundary element methods to solve elastodynamics problems in engineering practice. In order to account for sharply-varying contact tractions that may occur in such problems, the solutions in this article consider a biquadratic distribution of the loads within the loaded surface. In the present derivation, sets of Fourier transforms are used to uncouple the medium's equation of motion and enable the incorporation of boundary conditions directly as traction discontinuities. The article brings selected numerical results for various geometric and constitutive parameters. nonsingular non singular media threedimensional, threedimensional three dimensional, dimensional three-dimensional fullspace full space timeharmonic time harmonic practice sharplyvarying sharply varying surface derivation mediums medium s discontinuities parameters

Abstract This paper proposes a methodology to obtain the transient response of structural system interacting with soil-foundation schemes supported by viscoelastic soils. The structure and soil are divided into sub-systems. The time domain solution for each subsystem is formulated by an appropriated methodology. The equations of motion of structure are solved by Newmark integration algorithm. The transient response of the soil is obtained by a convolution integral. The convolution integral uses transient impulse response of viscoelastic soils. Newmark and convolution algorithms are formulated as input and output schemes, which, in turn, are plugged to the time stepping iterative algorithm. The scheme is applied to vertical response of a dynamical system interacting with a massless foundation laying on a soil modelled as a three-dimensional homogeneous viscoelastic half-space. For two distinct external forces, the resulting coupled displacements, interface forces, errors and number of iterations within each time step are provided.

Abstract This article describes an analysis of the dynamic response of coupled soil-pile-foundation systems. The soil and the pile models were developed in previous research works. This article describes the influence of three issues on the vertical dynamic foundation response. First, the influence of the foundation bearing mechanism is investigated. The foundation may be supported by the soil, by the pile or by a combination of both supporting mechanisms. A parameter is introduced to allow for a continuous change in the foundation supporting mechanism. Second, the influence of the excitation mechanism is investigated. The considered excitation mechanism are external forces applied directly at the foundation and an incoming wave field impinging the soil-pile-foundation system. Third, the article investigates if, for both excitation mechanism, the response at the pile head only is able to describe properly the soil-pile response. The analysis presented in the article contributes to an in-depth understanding of the dynamic response of coupled soil-pile-foundation systems.

Numerical simulation of engineering problems has reached such a large scale that the use of a parallel computing approach is required to obtain solutions within a reasonable time. Recent efforts have been made to implement these large scale computational tasks on general-purpose programmable graphics hardware (GPGPU). The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is specially well-suited to address problems that can be formulated in form of data-parallel computations with high arithmetic intensity. This work addresses the implementation of the direct version of the Boundary Element Method (DBEM) on a complementary GPU-CPU system. In this article, constant elements were used for the solution of 2D potential problems. A serial implementation of the BEM was rewritten under the SIMT (Single Instruction Multiple Thread) parallel programming paradigm. The code was developed on an NVidiaTM CUDA programming environment. The efficiency of the implemented strategies is investigated by solving a representative 2D potential problem. The paper reviews in detail the classical BEM formulation in order to be able to address the possible parallelization steps in the numerical implementation. The article reports the performance of the GPU-CPU system compared to the classical CPU-based system for an increasing number of boundary elements.

The present article discusses the relation between boundary conditions and the Sommerfeld radiation condition underlying the dynamics of unbounded domains. It is shown that the classical Dirichlet, Neumann and mixed boundary conditions do not fulfill the radiation condition. In the sequence, three strategies to incorporate the radiation condition in numerical methods are outlined. The inclusion of Infinite Elements in the realm of the Finite Element Method (FEM), the Dirichlet-to-Neumann (DtN) mapping and the Boundary Element Method (BEM) are described. Examples of solved dynamic problems in unbounded domains are given for the Helmholtz and the Navier operators. The advantages and limitations of the methodologies are discussed and pertinent literature is provided.