Summary The problem of the through‐soil coupling of structures has puzzled the researchers in the field for a long while, especially regarding the varied performance of identical, adjacent buildings in earthquakes. The phenomenon of structure‐soil‐structure interaction (SSSI) that has often been overlooked is recently being recognized: The possible effects in urban regions are yet to be thoroughly quantified. In this respect, the goal of this work was to rigorously investigate the interacting effects of adjacent buildings in a two‐dimensional setting. Detailed finite element models of 5‐, 15‐, and 30‐story structures, realistically designed, were used in forming building clusters on the viscoelastic half‐space. Perfectly matched layers were used to properly define the half‐space boundaries. The interaction of the structure and the soil medium because of the presence of spatially varying ground motion on the boundary of excavated region was considered. The effects of the foundation material and the distance between adjacent buildings on the structural behavior of the neighboring buildings were investigated using drift ratios and base shear quantities as the engineering demand parameters of interest. The effects of SSSI, first investigated in the frequency domain, was then quantified in the time domain using suites of appropriate ground motions in accordance with the soil conditions, and the results were compared with the counterpart SSI solution of a single building. The results showed that, for identical low‐rise structures, the effects of SSSI were negligible. Yet, neglecting SSSI for neighboring closely spaced high‐rise structures or building clusters with a large stiffness contrast was shown to lead to a considerable underestimation of the true seismic demands even compared with solutions obtained using the rigid base assumption.

Summary Seismic behavior of gravity dams has long been evaluated using a representative two‐dimensional (2D) system. Formulated for the gravity dams built in wide canyons, the assumption is nevertheless utilized extensively for almost all concrete dams due to the established procedures as well as the expected computational costs of a three‐dimensional model. However, a significant number of roller‐compacted concrete dams, characterized as such systems, do not conform to the basic assumptions of these methods by violating the conditions on canyon dimensions and joint‐spacing/details. Based on the premise that the 2D modeling assumption is overstretched for practical purposes in a variety of settings, the purpose of this study is to critically evaluate the use of 2D modeling for the prediction of the seismic demands on these systems. Using a rigorous soil–structure interaction approach, the difference between the two and three‐dimensional response for gravity dams was investigated first in the frequency domain for a range of canyon widths and foundation to dam moduli ratios. Then, the time domain differences between the crest displacements and the maximum principal stress were obtained using 70 different ground motions in order to show the possible bias introduced into the analysis results due to the modeling approach. The results of the study show that even for relatively wide canyons, the 2D analysis can lead to misleading predictions. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The development of advanced numerical techniques such as eXtended/ Generalized Finite Elements Methods (XFEM/GFEM) has provided means for accurate prediction of material failure. However, the present theories mostly rely on a global formulation, where the system of equations is subject to progressive dimension increase with crack evolution. In this regard, an independent multilayered enrichment is proposed for the XFEM/GFEM family of methods where a few elements in close proximity are assigned to an enrichment layer independent of the remaining ones. The enhanced degrees of freedom can be condensed out at the layer level, which leads to system dimensions, sparsity, and bandness identical to those of the underlying finite elements. Nodal and elemental enrichment methods are shown to be particular limit cases of present approach. The robustness of the proposed approach is first demonstrated in element-level examples. The use of only few adjacent elements in a group enrichment is shown to suffice for acceptable results while the order of the condition number of the final stiffness matrix resembles the underlying uncracked finite element counterpart. Finally, using several structural examples, the accuracy and robustness of the method is shown in terms of force-displacement response, stress fields, and traction continuity in nonlinear problems.

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