A soil-structure interaction analysis for seismic excitation is presented in this thesis. The purpose of this study is to determined an efficient method of including the effect of the radiation damping as well as the material damping characteristic of the infinite soil medium into analysis. Two methods are mainly investigated. One is a method utilizing the viscous boundary as energy absorbers along the outer boundaries of the finite element meshes of the soil medium. The other is a method using the frequency independent impedance computed based on the fundamental frequency of the soil-structure system.
Example analyses are carried out using a containment structure of a nuclear reactor in frequency domain. Results obtained from different methods are compared. Parametric studies are also performed to investigate the effect of the stiffness and damping characteristic of the soil medium.
