Radian of the vault influencing the seismic performances of straight wall arch underground structures

Abstract

however, the differences between seismic responses of these two types of underground structures, especially the vault radian influencing the seismic responses of arch structures are not clarified. This paper presents a detailed numerical investigation on the seismic responses of arch underground structures with different vault radians, and aims to illustrate the rule that vault radian affects the seismic responses of underground structures. Five arch underground structures are built for nonlinear soil-structure interaction analysis. The internal forces of the structural components of the underground structures only under gravity are discussed detailedly, and an optimum vault radian for perfect load-carrying functionality of arch underground structures is suggested. Then the structures are analyzed under seven scaled ground motions, amounting to a total of 35 dynamic calculations. The numerical results show that the vault radian can have beneficial effects on the seismic response of the arch structure, compared to the rectangular underground structures, causing the central columns to suffer smaller axial force and horizontal deformation. The conclusions provide some directive suggestions for the seismic design of the arch underground structures.