e537c30a_Funded_Project_Archive__Title
[Project #] 1412005a [PI Name] Tara Hutchinson [Institution] UC San Diego [Title] 
Performance-Based Design of Soil-Foundation Interface in Buildings Seismic loading on a building with shear walls can potentially cause the foundations of the shear walls to rock. Current building codes discourage designs that allow rocking. For existing buildings, however, it is often very expensive to retrofit foundations to prevent rocking. Furthermore, it has been suggested that building performance might actually be enhanced if rocking is allowed because rocking could reduce seismic demands on a building and dissipate energy in hysteresis at the foundation soil interface. Although previous work has focused on shear walls, results should be applicable to shallow foundations for building and bridge columns as well. The ultimate goal of this project is to develop the necessary tools to predict rotations and translations at the soil  shallow foundation interface and to allow engineers to assess, through quantitative analysis, the trade off between the benefits (energy dissipation and isolation) and the detriments (e.g., permanent and cyclic settlement and/or tilt) associated with foundation nonlinearity.
Funded Project Archive
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