A simplified procedure for formulation of soil-structure interaction problems

A soil-structure interaction system can be typically divided into regions such as the structure, the near field soil and the far-field soil. To analyze the behavior of the structure and the near-field soil, which is of most interest to practicing engineers, one has to determine beforehand the input seismic forces exerted by the source mechanism which are transmitted through the far-field soil. Traditional approaches for calculating the boundary forces often involve unnecessary tedious procedures. In this paper, it will be demonstrated that the condensation technique well known in structural mechanics can in reality be employed to formulate the soil-structure interaction problems in a rather straightforward manner. Such an approach has the advantage that the entire procedure involved is self-explanatory, which requires the minimum amount of operations. Copyright (C) 1996 Elsevier Science Ltd.