| In order to make structures safe from earthquake damage, a designing engineer needs to have some information about the waves to which it will be subjected and the structure's response to them. While a precise prediction of all seismic activity during the life of a structure is virtually impossible, earthquakes do occur within predictable limits with often repeated qualitative characteristics. We can, accordingly, choose a representative earthquake for a given site.;The present work presents a technique for examining the interaction of soil layers and structures in a two-dimensional profile subjected to incident SH waves. The analysis is carried out in the frequency domain where the response at any frequency in the spectrum is computed by the boundary element method. This enables the efficient solution of complex geometries, including lenses, tunnels, foundations, and cavities.;Results are presented which show that the method gives good agreement with known results and that the interaction of closely spaced structures is significant.;However, while we can guess well as to the nature of an earthquake in bedrock, we must also have some idea as to how the excitation is modified by the local conditions at the site. Some of the things influencing wave propagation would be soil material properties, layering of the soil, and the behaviour of structures embedded in the resting on the soil profile. |
