Seismic earth pressure acting on semi-underground structures considering cyclic behavior of soil ground

Abstract

Seismic earth pressure is a major action to design semi-underground structures. Previous studies numerically calculated the seismic earth pressures acting on semi-underground structures, but they used the elastic-perfectly plastic constitutive model with Mohr-Coulomb for the elasto-plastic model of soil, which may not represent the general behavior of soil ground. In this study, an elasto-plastic model that can consider the strain dependence of stiffness and cyclic stiffness reduction is used to obtain the seismic earth pressure acting on the semi-underground structure. The effects of the presence or absence of vertical degrees of freedom at the bottom and the shear wave velocity dependence on the confining pressure on the seismic earth pressure are also investigated. Comparing the earth pressure distributions with those obtained in previous studies, the increment from the initial soil pressure in this study was small. That could be explained by the influence of the gradual decrease in the stiffness due to the elasto-plastic behavior.