| The interaction between a foundation and supporting soil under static and dynamic loads (impact loads, machine vibrations or seismic ground motion) is of considerable importance in Geotechnical engineering. In addition to gravity (static) loads foundations of tall buildings, bridges and other important structures are designed to transmit dynamic loads to the supporting soil. Such loads arise due to earthquakes, wind storms or machine operations. Response of foundations to dynamic horizontal and/or vertical loading is key design component in the design of sensitive installations such as nuclear power plant, offshore wind turbines, signal towers and other sensitive structures. Predicting and limiting the horizontal and vertical deformation in such structures is an important design and performance criteria. Dynamic response of foundation and supported structure can be evaluated provide the dynamic stiffness of foundation and supporting soil is known. Thus, it is important to determine the dynamic stiffness of foundations.;The objective of this research work was to determine the static and dynamic horizontal and vertical stiffness of caissons at different embedment depths in homogeneous soil. The investigation was carried out by an available advance Boundary element (BE) program that uses isoparametric quadratic elements and a sophisticated self adaptive numerical integration scheme. The results are presented in the form of dimensionless graphs of dynamic stiffness and dashpot coefficient as a function of frequency. |
