Efficient procedure for seismic analysis of soil-structure interaction system

A simplified and efficient procedure, based on the viscous-spring artificial boundary and the modal superposition method, is developed to analyze the dynamic soil-structure interaction system in the time domain. The viscous-spring artificial boundary introduced in this procedure transforms the infinite soil-structure interaction system to an approximately finite system. A seismic wave input method is used to transform the wave scattering problem into the wave source problem. The modal superposition method is then applied to this approximate finite system. The results show that this method with only a few modes can significantly reduce the computational time with almost the same precision as the traditional direct integration method. Comparison of results from different loading times demonstrates that the advantages of this method are evident in computing with long loading time.