Application of experimental results on cyclic deforming of soils to seismic response analysis

It is shown in this paper that experimental results on stiffness and damping corresponding to cyclic deforming of soils can be well approached theoretically on an interval of strain variation from zero to arbitrary large values of strains. For this purpose, the following two methods are recommended: a modification of the hysteretic model obeying Masing's rule by adding elastic stresses to pure hysteretic stresses that do not change the corresponding backbone curve; and, as the second method, a non-linear model with frequency independent loss of energy in periodic processes. It is shown that in the area close to the free surface of soil, normalized strains resulting from propagation of seismic waves can be very large, even in the case of an input motion of relatively low intensity. Therefore, a using analytical approximations for experimental stress–strain relationships, which are suitable only for an interval of small and medium values of normalized strains, is insufficient in seismic response analysis.