Performance of an advanced sand constitutive model in modelling soil and soil-structure interaction under seismic excitation

There is a growing number of available advanced soil constitutive models aimed at capturing soil cyclic behaviour and their subsequent use in seismic applications. Nevertheless, detailed validation studies of these soil constitutive models on benchmark experimental works including seismic soil-structure interaction are still rare. This work presents a short validation study of the seismic performance of an advanced elastoplastic sand constitutive model on a boundary value problem including kinematic and inertial soil-structure interaction. The results of the finite element numerical model for the free field and structural responses are compared with the experimental work on a group of piles analysed in a flexible soil container filled with dry sand and subjected to simplified seismic loading. In general, the comparisons show a satisfactory match between the results of the simulations and the experiments, with the exception of the numerical predictions of settlements. The computed results are discussed based on: i) the dominant stress-paths in soil; ii) parametric studies on the settlement evaluation; iii) the origin of the high frequency motion oscillations to simple sinusoidal input motions; all with respect to potential improvements in the formulation of the elastic behaviour of the constitutive model in the future.