A semi-analytical approach for soil-pile interaction to be used in structure-borne noise problems.

Ground-borne noise and vibration induced by railways, roads tra c as well as construction activities are becoming in important causes of annoyance for building inhabitants. The incident elastic waves generated by those sources can be propagated through the soil and come into the building using its foundations as the principal path in order to transmit these structural annoyances. The paper is focused on the study of the soil-pile interaction using a new semi-analytical approach for the computation of its dynamic response when it is subjected to incident wave fields, axial loads and/or lateral one. Furthermore, the displacement and force compatibilities of the system are performed on their coupling points, which are created when the pile is divided into segments and represented by its corresponding node. The paper aims to study the number of pile segments needed in order to improve the accuracy of the dynamic response avoiding large computational efforts. This semi-analytical approach has been verified comparing the system responses against the approximate analytical approach based on linear elasticity developed by Novak.