but will be described in Section 3.
The existence of the addition, if the vertical movement is large the column
adjacent building in the excavation model is simply may be subjected to tension. In this situation, the
represented by the footings with their reaction forces. restraints at that column will be released and no vertical
These decoupled simulations can take advantages of the movement is assigned.
modeling capability of PLAXIS 3D in geotechnical
engineering and SAP 2000 in structural application. Model building in SAP2000
The key issue of the decoupled analysis procedure Model excavation in Plaxis 3D
is how to bridge the two problems with a robust and
Analyze building with prescribed vertical and
efficient iteration process. Figure 2 shows the proposed horizontal displacements using SAP2000 (*)
iteration scheme to link the excavation and structure
simulations together. In the initial step, the building is Obtain vertical and horizontal reactions
analyzed in SAP 2000 prior to the excavation activity at footings
i.e. only the self-weight and live loads are considered, Release restraints at
and no excavation-induced movements exist. The the footings of Yes Did tension occur
outputs are vertical and lateral reactions at the footings. columns with tension,
and apply no vertical in column?
The forces obtained from the above structural analysis displacements
No
are in turn used as input in the PLAXIS 3D excavation
Analyze excavation with obtained vertical
model (as shown in Figure 1a). The outputs are the and horizontal reactions using Plaxis 3D
vertical and horizontal displacements at the footing
positions. These displacements are then adopted as the Obtain vertical and horizontal column
prescribed conditions in the subsequent structural displacements
analysis. In other words, after the initial step the
Compare the difference in reactions and
building analysis is conducted with the excavation displacements with this step and previous step
induced movements. This procedure is iterated until the
difference in the outputs of reaction forces and
displacements from two successive steps are less than a Is difference No
within ±5%
specified tolerance such as 5%.
Yes
Obtain final values of forces and
displacements
120 m (vertical and horizontal)
305 m
(*) Note: At the first step, prescribed displacement = 0
46 m
Fig. 2. Iteration procedure for decoupled analysis
Building location 3 ANALYTICAL MODELS
Excavation This paper adopts a well-documented excavation
case history, namely Taipei National Enterprise Center
(TNEC), presented by Ou et al. (1998). TNEC
(a) Excavation model in PLAXIS 3D
constructed by top-down construction method had the
diaphragm wall with thickness of 0.9 m and depth of 35
m. There were totally 7 excavation stages. The
excavation geometry was 43 m wide and 105 m long.
The largest excavation depth was 19.7 m. The soil
strata were alternating layers of sand and clay from the
ground surface to 46 m deep. There was a thick clay
layer from 8 m to 33 m deep that had dominant
influence on the excavation behavior. In the simulation,
the hardening soil and Mohr-Coulomb models are used
for clay and sand, respectively. The 3D TNEC
excavation model is shown in Figure 1a. The
excavation is firstly simulated in greenfield condition in
(b) Building model in SAP 2000
order to verify the reasonableness of the excavation
Fig. 1. Decoupled simulation models model. Then the nearby building is considered using the
decouple analysis procedure.
In SAP 2000, the horizontal movement is applied on The building is a typical school-like structure in
the footing through a soil spring. The spring stiffness is Taiwan. It has four stories as shown in Figure 1b. The
obtained from a study of soil-footing interaction. In height of each story is 3.6 m. There are 10 equal spans
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