Earthquake response analysis of buildings supported on piles using beam on spring model

The practical and simple analysis method is proposed for the earthquake response of the buildings supported on a large number of piles. The proposed model is based on the beam-on-spring model which consists of lumped masses, beam elements, horizontal soil springs, dampers and shear soil springs taking into consideration of pile group effects for the simplified method. The group-factor of horizontal soil springs is simply evaluated from the group-factor of a pile-soil system, and shear soil spring is estimated from the approximate equation. The accuracy of the proposed method is demonstrated by the simulation analysis of the observed earthquake record.