Soil Structure Interaction Effects on Hysteretic Energy Demand for Stiffness Degrading Systems Built on Flexible Soil Sites

This paper aims to study the influence of soil-structure interaction on plastic energy demand spectra directly derived from the energy-balance equations of soil-shallow-foundation structure with respect to an ensemble of far-field strong ground motions obtained from Pacific Earthquake Engineering Research (PEER) database and recorded on alluvium soil. The superstructure is modeled as a single-degree-of-freedom (SDOF) oscillator with Modified Clough stiffness degrading model resting on flexible soil. The soil beneath the superstructure is considered as a homogeneous elastic half space and is modeled through the concept of Cone shallow foundation Models. A parametric study is carried out for 2400 soil-structure systems with various aspect ratios of the building as well as non-dimensional frequency as a representative of the structure-to-soil stiffness ratio having a wide range of fundamental fixed-base period and target ductility demand values under a family of 19 earthquake ground motions. Results show that generally for the structure located on softer soils severe dissipated energy drop will be observed with respect to the corresponding fixed-base system. The only exception is for the case of short period slender buildings in which the hysteretic energy demand of soil-structure systems could be up to 70% larger than that of their fixed-base counterparts. Moreover, dissipated energy spectra are much more sensitive to the variation of target ductility especially for the case of drastic SSI effect.