Abstract Summary
Dynamic soil-structure interaction studies are widely used in geotechnical earthquake engineering to evaluate structural capacity and component’ safety requirements under seismic loading. Given the uncertainties and physical complexity of the seismic excitation and soil domain, as well as computational constrains, very often soil-structure interaction studies are bounded to vertically incident plane-waves and horizontal soil stratification. However, these simplifications may not be always adapted to all site conditions and seismic scenarios. In order to tackle this issue, the domain reduction method (DRM) proposed by Bielak et al. (2003) is considered in this work. It consists of a two-steps weak coupling approach where the complete 3D wave field obtained from an auxiliary domain is replaced by equivalent nodal forces to be exerted on the boundary surface of a reduced domain, providing a more realistic definition of seismic excitation. In this framework, the complete problem can be decoupled and solved in two separate models with adapted numerical approaches. Therefore, an auxiliary domain defined in a regional scale integrating the seismic source and wave propagation from the source to the site of interest is proposed. This first step can be solved in a spectral element framework, which is adapted for large-scale wave propagation studies. By obtaining the equivalent nodal forces on the boundary surface of a reduced finite element model, soil-structure interaction analysis studies can be conducted integrating all the relevant aspects from source and path characteristics of a given seismic scenario. Consequently, the “incompatibility” of the different scales of the problem (regional, local) can be efficiently solved, by maintaining a sufficiently sophisticated numerical model for the local scale, where the hypothesis of a nonlinear soil behavior can be examined. The validation of the coupling is discussed in Korres et al. (2021), while this work focuses on the performance of the second step of the coupling approach and the FEM resolution. The main objective is to present the feasibility of the FEM resolution with the DRM excitation in a high-performance computing (HPC) framework. A simple case study is chosen so as to demonstrate the gains in terms of computational performance. Comparisons are also made with traditional approaches utilizing direct parallel solvers.
