Vibration control of piled-structures through structure-soil-structure-interaction

This paper deals with the vibration control of existing structures forced by earthquake induced ground motion. To this aim it is proposed for the first time to exploit the structure-soil-structure mechanism to develop a device, hosted in the soil but detached from the structure, able to absorb part of the seismic energy so to reduce the vibration of neighbourhood structures. The design of the device is herein addressed to protect monopile structures from earthquake induced ground motion. By modelling the ground motion as zero-mean quasi-stationary response-spectrum-compatible Gaussian stochastic process, the soil as visco-elastic medium and the target monopiled-structure as a linear behaving structure the device, herein called Vibrating Barrier (ViBa), has been designed through an optimization procedure. Various numerical and experimental results are produced to show the effectiveness of the ViBa. Remarkably, a significant reduction of the structural response up to 44% has been achieved.