Abstract
The author has studied the time domain evaluation of soil impedance and has proposed a transform method. In a previous paper, structures deeply embedded in layered soil were investigated based on the embedded SR model. However, actual soil often has inhomogeous conditions that can not be expressed by theoretical impedance like that used in the paper. For estimating such soil conditions, discrete soil analysis models like FEM are employed. In this paper, a modified transform method was proposed to improve the convergence characteristics, first. Then, full-matrix soil impedance of structures embedded in inhomogeous soil was calculated by axi-symmetric FEM models. The full-matrix impulse response was evaluated by the modified method, and earthquake response analyses were carried out. The efficacy of the proposed method was confirmed through these studies.
