Sensitivity of the stochastic response of structures coupled with vibrating barriers

The sensitivity of the stochastic response of linear behaving structures controlled by the novel Vibrating Barrier (ViBa) device is scrutinized. The Vibrating Barrier (ViBa) is a massive structure, hosted in the soil, calibrated for protecting structures by exploiting the structure–soil–structure interaction effect. Therefore the paper addresses the study of the sensitivity of soil–structure coupled systems in which the soil is modelled as a linear elastic medium with hysteretic damping. In order to accomplish efficient sensitivity analyses, a reduced model is determined by means of the Craig–Bampton procedure. Moreover, a lumped parameter model is used for converting the hysteretic damping soil model rigorously valid in the frequency domain to the approximately equivalent viscous damping model in order to perform conventional time-history analysis. The sensitivity is evaluated by determining a semi-analytical method based on the dynamic modification approach for the case of multi-variate stochastic input process. The ground motion is modelled as non-stationary zero-mean Gaussian random process defined by a given evolutionary Power Spectral Density function. The paper presents the sensitivity of the response statistics of a model of an industrial building, passively controlled by the ViBa, to relevant design parameters. Comparisons with pertinent Monte Carlo Simulation will show the effectiveness of the proposed approach.