A Simple Engineering Soil Surface Vibration Prediction Method

In urban areas where the infrastructure is dense and construction of new structures is near existing and sensitive buildings, frequently vibrations, caused by human activities, occur. Generated waves in the soil may adversely affect surrounding buildings. These vibrations have to be predicted a priori by using currently available knowledge of the soil dynamics. In order to make a good prediction of the soil surface vibration, it is necessary to perform calculations with a Finite Element Method (FEM). The disadvantages of the FEM are that this requires a special software package and a long time for the modelling and calculations. Therefore, it would be very useful to derive a simple model for engineering purposes, which could be used to predict geotechnical vibrations close to the source, without the need of special software and long calculations. Such a method is proposed in this article. This method is validated by a vibration test performed on a peaty site in the Netherlands. The predictions made with this method, have been compared with both the field measurements and the FEM calculations. The comparison proves that by using the presented vibration prediction method, the vibrations can be predicted as accurate as with the FEM.