Soil-structure interaction for traffic induced vibrations in buildings

Sammanfattning: Major cities in Sweden experience a population growth, demanding innovative solutions regarding land exploitation for residential housing. One solution is to build closer to existing railway tracks, however difficulties arise regarding determining traffic induced vibrations from trains. This sometimes results in vibrations being too large in buildings regarding comfort, resulting in expensive measures taken as to reduce the vibrations. The scope of this thesis is to investigate the soil-structure interaction caused by traffic induced vibrations in buildings using ABAQUS FE software, where the aim is to partly investigate how a structure effects surrounding soil, partly to investigate which parameters of a structure has largest favorable impact on foundation vibrations. Major results include that ground vibrations at 2-4 meters parallel to a structure relative to the vibration source remain constant, independent on whether a house is present or not. Further results show that increasing the thickness of the foundation slab has a mitigating effect on the induced vibrations. The main conclusions of this thesis include that quadratic elements are superior to linear elements for dynamic analyses for soil, and that accelerometers should be placed at least 2-4 m next to an existing structure to obtain accurate measurements comparable to if no structure was present.