The prediction of the performance of a structure supported on pile foundations is of paramount importance in the seismic design and assessment of new and existing structures. This paper presents the key elements of a hybrid Finite Element Technique to perform the coupled soil-pile-superstructure and site response analysis. Model simulations of a series of large scale seismic soil-pile-superstructure tests conducted on the 6.1m x 6.1m UC Berkeley/PEER center multidirectional shaking table are used to calibrate and verify the proposed numerical technique. Detailed comparison with measured structural and 'free field' soil response in the shaking table tests show that the proposed formulation gives very good descriptions of maximum spectral accelerations and frequency response. The model accurately captures the transition from kinematic and inertial response of these 'simple' systems.
展开▼
