A discontinuous Galerkin method for seismic soil-structure interaction analysis in the time domain

A technique for modeling transient wave propagation in unbounded media is extended and applied to seismic soil-structure interaction analysis in the time domain. The technique, based on the discontinuous Galerkin method, requires lower computational cost and less storage than the boundary element method, and the time-stepping scheme resulting from Newmark's method in conjunction with the technique is unconditionally stable, allowing for efficient and robust time-domain computations. To extend the technique to cases characterized by seismic excitation, the free-field motion is used to compute effective forces, which are introduced on the boundary of the computational domain containing the structure and the soil in the vicinity of the structure. A numerical example on a dam-foundation system subjected to seismic excitation demonstrates the performance of the method. Copyright (C) 2003 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.