ANALYTICAL SOLUTION TO THE SEISMIC RESPONSE OF VISCOELASTIC SOIL LAYERS

The response of a multi-layered soil deposit subjected to a horizontal earthquake ground motion is obtained in a form which is exact in the sense that both the starting transients and the steady state parts are included in the solution and can be evaluated to any degree of accuracy. The solution is compared with that obtained as a steady state one for harmonic excitations. It is shown that the transient part of the response which is required for the solution to satisfy initial conditions, and which does not appear in the steady state, may be important, particularly for long-period layers subjected to short-period acceleration trains. For small values of the radiation coefficients, radiation damping may be introduced in the solution in the form of equivalent viscous damping.