Numerical modeling of ground-borne vibrations induced by pile driving with a simple and direct material damping approach

Ground-borne vibrations are an increasingly common problem in large cities due to its considerable disturbance in terms of human comfort and health. In this sense, construction operations stand as a significant source of vibrations and may be critical since construction sites are frequently adjacent to existing buildings. In the present work, vibrations induced by pile driving are studied. A time-domain finite element model is developed and a post-processing approach is proposed to simulate the material damping of the soil. This damping formulation stands as a simple and direct approximation of the material damping in the system. In order to do so, the numerical response is computed without material damping, which is introduced as a post-processing procedure. An explicit and highly efficient method is applied for the time integration of the equation of motion, considering an axisymmetric formulation. A numerical application is carried out and the obtained results are compared to previous numerical and in-situ measurements available in the literature, indicating a good agreement with previous studies.