Application of Biot's poroelasticity to some soil dynamics problems in civil engineering

This review type of paper shows how the poroelastodynamic theory of Biot can be applied to some soil dynamics problems encountered in transportation engineering, which have been solved by the present authors. These problems involve rigid walls retaining poroelastic soil and subjected to harmonic seismic waves and moving loads on poroelastic soil. Both classes of problems involve a soil layer over bedrock, are of the plane strain type and are solved analytically by two methods: a direct (almost exact and exact for the above two classes of problems) method and an approximate method. The effects of shear modulus, porosity, permeability and hysteretic damping of the soil medium as well as the seismic frequency for retaining walls and velocity for moving loads on the dynamic response are numerically evaluated in order to assess their relative importance on that response. (c) 2006 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.