Seismic Inversion for Identification of Soil Stiffness and Damping from Measured Data in Marine Setting

Summary Soil stiffness and damping parameters are important to correctly model the structural response and energy dissipation, especially for embedded and lightly damped structures. This research aims to demonstrate that multi-channel analysis of surface wave (MASW) techniques can be used to generate a reliable in-situ measurement of the soil damping in marine environments. The goal of the project is to refine and apply a reliable method which is able to estimate the soil stiffness and damping profile in the depth range of 0–30m. Love waves, which are rarely used for surface wave applications and to the author’s knowledge never used for a damping inversion from real surface waves measurements, are included in this analysis. The frequency content of the present dataset is lower than previous investigation, which is important for extrapolating the damping parameters to the even lower frequency range of relevance for structural models. Finally, it is proposed a novel technique for retrieving the frequency dependence of the material damping by using on-site collected data.