A Unified Thermodynamic-Based Macroelement for Geotechnical Systems

The macroelement approach for simulating soil-structure interaction has been largely developed for shallow foundations and lately extended to some different typologies, such as monopiles and pile groups. The existing formulations are derived through a variety of formal approaches, mostly neglecting the inertial effects under dynamic loading. Macroelement representations are moreover rarely available in commonly used numerical environments, limiting severely the method applicability. This paper proposes instead a unified macroelement description for an extended class of geotechnical systems, being it a shallow or a deep foundation, a caisson/monopile or a bridge abutment. The formulation extends a recently developed macroelement framework for the nonlinear and frequency-dependent analysis of soil-foundation systems. The incremental multiaxial response is derived through thermodynamically consistent potential functions, requiring solely the initial stiffness and the ultimate capacity of ...