VERTICAL DYNAMIC RESPONSE OF A FOOTING

VERTICAL DYNAMIC RESPONSE OF A FOOTING

This document describes an example that has been used to verify the dynamic response
of a footing in PLAXIS.
Used version:
• PLAXIS 2D -Dynamic Module - Version 2011
• PLAXIS 3D - Dynamic Module - Version 2012
Input: In this example, the response of a massless circular footing to a vertical harmonic
loading has been obtained. The footing is of radius 2 m and is assumed to be resting on
the surface of a sub-soil with drained linear elastic properties. The axisymmetric model in
PLAXIS 2D is shown in Figure 1. The geometry is 50 m deep and 100 m wide. Note that
in PLAXIS 3D the model is extended by 100 in the y-direction.
The soil has a unit weight (unsaturated) of 16 kN/m3 , Poisson’s ratio of 0.3, E value of
5.2 × 105 kN/m2 and therefore Vs = 350 m/s. The Rayleigh damping parameters are
chosen to be α = 0.686 and β = 0.001736. The plate, representing the footing with radius
2 m, is very rigid (EA, EI and ν are 1.0 × 1012 kN/m, 1.0 × 106 kNm2 /m and 0.00
respectively) with no damping (Rayleigh damping parameters are zero). The mass of the
plate may be ignored. A vertical harmonic load of amplitude 10000 kN/m2 has been
acting on the plate area with a frequency of 4 Hz. In PLAXIS 3D a quarter of a cylinder
with a height of 5.0 m is defined under the load to be used for local refinement.
Absorbent boundary is applied to the lower lateral and right vertical boundaries.

Figure 1 Geometry, finite element and boundary conditions

Initial stress generation may be neglected. No pore pressure generation was necessary
as water level has not been considered. A plastic analysis (staged construction) has then
been carried out in Phase 1 considering the plate with the load acting vertically on the
plate area (see Figure 1). The next phase (Phase 2) is subsequently chosen to perform
the dynamic analysis for 1 sec. For the numerical procedure the Newmark alpha and
Newmark beta parameters for the time integration are defined as 0.3025 and 0.6
respectively in order to decrease the dispersion in the plots. This can be done as well by
refining the mesh. The deformed mesh of the soil-footing system has been shown in

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Figure 2.

Figure 2 The deformed mesh of the footing-soil system

Meshing:
In PLAXIS 2D the two top layers in the model are refined by a factor of 0.125. An overall
Medium global coarseness is used.
As mentioned in the Input part, a quarter of a cylinder with a height of 5 m is defined
under the load in PLAXIS 3D. The cylinder is refined by a factor of 0.125. An overall
Medium global coarseness is used.
Output: The time history of vertical displacement is obtained on the surface at a node
directly below the centre of the footing (x=0.0 m) and at 3 other points on the soil surface
at an increasing distance from the footing centre (i.e. at (x=2.0 m), (x=10.0 m) and
(x=40.0 m), refer Figure 4). The magnitude of displacement amplitude is gradually
decreasing with the increasing distance from the point of excitation.

Figure 3 Time history of displacement obtained in PLAXIS 2D

Verification: The frequency dependent dynamic stiffness of a circular footing resting on

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 VERTICAL DYNAMIC RESPONSE OF A FOOTING

Figure 4 Time history of displacement obtained in PLAXIS 3D

a soil deposit underlain by a rigid base may be written as (Pradhan, Baidya & Ghosh,
2004):

K (a0 ) = Ks k (a0 ) + ia0 c(a0 ) − Ba02

 
(1)

with

B = 0.25b0 (1 − ν) (2)

where, Ks is the vertical static stiffness coefficient of a circular disk on homogeneous

half-space, k(a0 ) denotes the spring (real) coefficient, c(a0 ) denotes the damping
(imaginary) coefficient, a0 is the dimensionless frequency parameter and b0 is the mass
ratio. The expressions for Ks , a0 and b0 are given by Equations 3, 4 and 5 respectively.

4GR
Ks = (3)
1−ν
ωR
a0 = (4)
Vs
m
b0 = (5)
ρR 3
In Equations 3, 4 and 5, G and ν are respectively the shear modulus and the Poisson’s
ratio of the sub-soil layer supporting the footing, R is the radius of the disk or footing, Vs
is the shear wave velocity in the soil layer, m is the total mass of the footing including the
mass of any supported structure like machine etc. and ω is the frequency of the forced
vibration.
The maximum vertical displacement immediately beneath the footing may be obtained
from the plot as 54.72815 mm which may then be used to calculate the vertical dynamic
stiffness of the footing as:

10000 × π × 22
Kv = = 2296143 kN/m
0.05472815

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The value of the vertical dynamic stiffness of the footing may be found out from the
analytical solution as 2335565 kN/m. Thus, it may be seen that the numerical value of the
dynamic stiffness obtained from PLAXIS shows very close resemblance to the value of
the same when obtained from the theory - the difference is quite negligible, 1.67 % in this
case.

REFERENCES

[1] Pradhan, P., Baidya, D.K., Ghosh, D.P. (2004). Dynamic response of foundations
resting on layered soil by cone model. Soil Dynamics and Earthquake Engineering,
24(06), 425–434.

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