Application of Biot’s Poroelasticity to Seismic Analysis of Subway Stations in a Saturated Poroelastic Half-space: Effects of Viscous Coupling

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a parametric investigation on the effects of viscous coupling on the seismic responses of subway stations in a saturated poroelastic half-space which is modeled as a two-phase medium by the Biot’s theory. Moreover, an equivalent single-phase model for the saturated poroelastic half-space is introduced, and comparisons between the single-phase solutions and the two-phase solutions are made. The results are obtained by a finite element-indirect boundary element coupling method. The study shows that the viscous coupling has significant influences on the seismic internal forces and deformation of the subway stations, and the single-phase approximation can cause large errors.

KEYWORDS:

• Subway station
• seismic responses
• saturated poroelastic half-space
• viscous coupling
• FE-IBE coupling method

Acknowledgments

This study was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant 51978462, which is gratefully acknowledged.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [51978462].