Scattering of Seismic Rayleigh Waves by a Semi-circular Basin with Hysteresis Material Model

This chapter uses a novel time-domain finite element method to investigate the propagation of Rayleigh waves through a semi-circular basin. The novelty of this work lies in the inclusion of nonlinearity and damping characteristics of the basin soil material. Three cases were analysed: soil material inside the basin is identical to the soil outside in the first case, and the soil material inside the basin is modelled with different levels of hysteresis in other two cases. The first case is used to verify the accuracy of the numerical model, while the other two are used to examine the effect of soil nonlinearity and damping on seismic ground motion during the scattering of Rayleigh waves. The results show that the inclusion of soil nonlinearity and damping significantly amplifies the displacement amplitude at surface locations inside the basin.