On the reduction of FEM models dealing with vibrations propagation from ground to buildings

The problem of ground-borne vibrations in contact with a building's basement is crucial to the comfort of people living in buildings located very close to roads or railway tracks. The numerical finite elements models used to describe this situation are heavy to compute: it must combine the complexity of the building with the large dimensions of the soil. We propose a method to reduce the model computation cost while keeping accurate results. The goal of our study is to remove the ground from the model by applying efforts and boundary conditions to the building foundation to reproduce the soil/structure interactions. The full model of a simple building with a basement on a single-layer soil is studied to extract the coupling stresses. Corresponding efforts are applied to the building alone, with several boundary conditions tested. The results show similar vibration levels on the building floors, for a far lower time of computation.