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Responses of adjacent ground and building induced by excavation using 3D

decoupled simulation

Article in Japanese Geotechnical Society Special Publication · January 2016

DOI: 10.3208/[Link]-14

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Japanese Geotechnical Society Special Publication The 15th Asian Regional Conference on
Soil Mechanics and Geotechnical Engineering

Responses of adjacent ground and building induced by excavation using 3D decoupled simulation

Horn-Da Lin i), Sang Mendy ii), Phuoc H. Dang ii), Yo-Ming Hsieh iii) and Cheng-Cheng Chen i)

i) Professor, Department of Civil and Construction Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei, Taiwan.
ii) Graduate Student, Department of Civil and Construction Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology, Taipei,
Taiwan.
iii) Associated Professor, Department of Civil and Construction Engineering, National Taiwan University of Science and Technology,
Taipei, Taiwan.

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a study on excavation-induced deformation characteristics of ground and adjacent building using
three-dimensional (3D) decoupled simulations. A decoupled analytical technique is proposed to enhance the
consideration of both the 3D nonlinear soil behavior and the inelastic structure responses. The excavation effects and
the adjacent structure’s responses are decoupled and simulated by two separate programs: PLAXIS 3D for
excavation and SAP 2000 for structure. Two models are bridged by a simple iteration scheme. A well-documented
excavation case history and low-rise framed building are used for demonstration. The obtained results exhibit that
the decoupled analytical method is feasible to incorporate properly the 3D nonlinear soil behavior and the inelastic
structure responses. It also seems practical to use since the numerical outcomes often converge within several
iterations. The analytical results show that the lateral and vertical movements of the structure are significantly
different from those of the greenfield ground. In addition, more in-depth inelastic structure responses can be
investigated such as where the plastic hinge may occur in the structure. This is a significant advancement as it
provides additional insights on assessing the building’s potential damage and serviceability.

Keywords: excavation, soil-structure interaction, decoupled analysis, building damage potential

1 INTRODUCTION account the nonlinear soil behavior and the inelastic

building behavior. In this pilot study, the excavation
With the rapid infrastructural development in urban
and the adjacent building were decoupled and simulated
cities, the need for space makes it necessary to conduct
by two separate programs that are specified for the
deep excavations. The movements caused by such
excavation and the structure. The preliminary results
excavations can cause damage on nearby buildings,
are very promising and warrant further study. Therefore,
especially for the low-rise buildings founded on spread
this decoupled analytical procedure is enhanced in this
footings. It is because this kind of structure may be
paper in a more comprehensive manner. The developed
vulnerable to the differential settlements induced by the
technique will be demonstrated with a well-documented
excavation. Therefore, it is important to predict those
excavation case history. The 3D greenfield excavation
movements and take precautionary measures in order to
model is firstly considered. The nearby building is then
prevent these damages.
taken into account. The responses of the excavation and
Numerical analysis has been a useful tool in
the adjacent building are studied. The effects of the
predicting the behavior of excavations. Even though
building existence on the excavation behavior are also
great achievements have been made, the behavior of
examined.
excavations with buildings nearby is hard to predict
with the current approaches since most of the
2 DECOUPLED ANALYSIS PROCEDURE
simulations are simply done in the plane strain
condition or without considering the adjacent building. The primary concept of the decoupled analysis
In some cases, the building is considered but its procedure is to decouple the excavation-structure
geometry is usually simplified and structural properties system into two individual problems of excavation and
are limited within linear elastic range. structure. In particular, the excavation and building are
In a recent study, the authors (Lin et al. 2014) modeled respectively by PLAXIS 3D and SAP 2000 as
presented a 3D simulation procedure of the excavation illustrated in Figure 1. Detailed dimensions of the
problem with building consideration that can take into excavation and the adjacent building are omitted here

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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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with total length of 45 m in the longitudinal direction 1.3 times. It may be due to the building weight. This
and the width is 12 m. The footing is connected by a observation implies that in evaluating building’s
tie-beam system. The sizes of beams, columns are serviceability or damage potential the building
determined according to the reference values in the deformation should be used instead of greenfield
collected database. Since the building settlement ground settlement adopted in common practice. In
induced by a nearby excavation is mainly examined, for addition, the horizontal footing movements seem to be
simplicity the loading considered includes two types: more evenly distributed than the greenfield ground
dead load and live load. The load magnitude is movements because of the restraint in the tie beams.
determined based on Taiwan’s building design code. In
specific, the average dead load is 1.2 t/m2; and the live 4.2 Building response due to nearby excavation
load is 0.3 t/m2. It is noted that only 50% of the live The excavation-induced building responses are
load is used due to the temporary nature of the live load. shown in Figure 4 in terms of axial forces and plastic
In the simulation, the building can be positioned at any formation. These two factors are essential to examine
place surrounding the excavation such as at the center the building performance. Figure 4a indicates that
or near the corner zones. Herein, for simplicity only a tensile force can be found in tie beams at the far spans.
scenario of building at the center section is This is because the maximum horizontal movement in
demonstrated as illustrated in Figure 1a. the building takes place in the middle span. It gives a
push towards the excavation causing compression and a
4 RESULTS AND ENGINEERING pull on the members on the other side causing tension.
IMPLICATIONS Normally, a concrete member is relatively vulnerable to
the tensile force. Therefore, this observation is valuable
4.1 Ground response
especially for the structural design to avoid damage or
It is found that the predicted wall and ground
severe crack in the beams.
movements under greenfield condition are close to the
Moreover, plastic deformation is found in the
field measurements. In other words, the excavation
building as demonstrated Figure 4b. It occurs on the
model is proven to be reasonable. When the building is
beam at the beam-column joints and concentrates on
included in the simulation, the comparisons in the
the top floors at spans near the excavation zone. The
vertical and horizontal movements of the building and
plastic deformation implies that the member forces are
the greenfield ground are shown in Figure 3.
significant comparing to the bearing capacity and the
member may have high potential of damage. Therefore,
the plastic hinge can provide insights on where
potential damage may occur.

(a) Vertical
(a) Member forces showing tension and compression in
tie beam

(b) Horizontal
Fig. 3. Building and greenfield movements at the final (b) Deformed frame with plastic points
excavation stage
Fig. 4. Excavation-induced building responses
Apparently, the maximum building settlement is
larger than maximum greenfield settlement by about To estimate overall building performance, the

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angular distortion and lateral strain are adopted based ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
on previous works. Son and Cording (2005) proposed
This study is supported by Ministry of Science and
an evaluation chart to assess the building serviceability
Technology of Taiwan under grant numbers of
as shown in Figure 5. The results from the decoupled
102-2221-E-011-104 and 103-2221-E-011-072-MY2.
analysis are also plotted in Figure 5. In this study, the
This support is gratefully acknowledged.
lateral strains are calculated at the level of footing
location. Figure 5 shows that the first spans suffer more
REFERENCES
from angular distortion while the spans farther away
from the excavation show greater lateral strain. The 1. Lin, H. D., Truong, H. M., Dang, H, P., and Chen, C. C.
lateral strain characteristic agrees with the tension (2014): Assessment of 3D excavation and adjacent building’s
responses with consideration of excavation-structure
observed in spans 7-10 (Figure 4a). Meanwhile, the
interaction, Geotechnical Special Publication, ASCE, 242,
angular distortion is also consistent with the plastic 256-265.
hinge locations (Figure 4b). 2. Ou, C. Y., Liao, J. T., and Lin, H. D. (1998): Performance of
diaphragm wall constructed using top-down method, Journal
of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmetal Engineering, ASCE,
124(9), 798-808.
3. Son, M., and Cording, E. J. (2005): Estimation of building
damage due to excavation-induced ground movements,
Journal of Geotechnical and Geoenvironmetal Engineering,
ASCE, 131(2), 162-177.

Fig. 5. Building damage evaluation on the chart proposed

by Son and Cording (2005)

5 CONCLUSIONS
This paper presents a decoupled analytical
procedure and demonstrates its applicability in
analyzing the 3D excavation-structure system.
Nonlinear excavation behavior and inelastic structure
responses can be simulated separately with well
accepted computer programs in geotechnical and
structure engineering. A robust iteration procedure is
developed to bridge the results from the decoupled
analyses. This decoupled procedure is proven to be
relatively simple, efficient, and exhibits high potential
for practical application.
The analytical results of the responses of the
adjacent ground and building induced by excavation
using 3D decoupled simulation shows that the building
settlement is larger than the greenfield ground
settlement at the same position. The horizontal
movement of the building is more uniform than that of
the greenfield ground. The relative footing movements
due to the nearby excavation may cause tensile strains
in the tie beam connecting the footings. In addition,
plastic hinges may occur in the building. The calculated
lateral strain and angular distortion are also consistent
with locations of the tensile force and the plastic hinge
formation in the building. These observations provide
valuable insights on how and where the damage may
occur.

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