Seismic Response of Alluvial Valleys to SH Waves

This paper presents a theoretical study on the seismic response of alluvial valleys. The considered model consists of a two-dimensional elastic inclusion of arbitrary shape embedded in a stiffer half-plane excited by vertically or obliquely incident SH waves. Computations are conducted using a procedure based on the boundary element method. As known, this numerical technique is well suited to deal with wave propagation in infinite media as it avoids the introduction of fictitious boundaries and reduces by one the dimensions of the problem. This provides significant advantages from a computational point of view. A one-dimensional closed form solution is also used for comparison, and the most significant differences between the results obtained using the two methods are highlighted.