The recent National Cooperative Highway Research Program (NCHRP) Report 611 titled “Seismic Analysis and Design of Retaining Walls, Buried Structures, Slopes, and Embankments” has been widely adopted as a guideline in the analysis design of buried/embedded structures due to its computational simplicity and broadly accepted accuracy for simple soil-structure configurations. However, the method is not without shortcomings. In particular, the NCHRP method is not sensitive to the inherently broadband frequency content of seismic input excitations, soil heterogeneities, and potential kinematic interaction effects. Comparisons of their predictions to both centrifuge experimental data and validated numerical simulations are made in the present study, in order to quantitatively assess the brackets of the validity of the NCHRP 611 method—specifically, for soil-structure analyses of buried rectangular and circular structures, and offer an improvement that is simple to implement.

1. W. Zhang, E. Esmaeilzadeh Seylabi, E. Taciroglu (2019), A quantitative assessment of the NCHRP 611 method for soil-structure interaction analysis of buried circular structures & a proposed improvement, Computers and Geotechnics, 113, 103103

2. E. Esmaeilzadeh Seylabi, W. Zhang, E. Agapaki, D. Pitilakis, S. J. Brandenberg, J. P. Stewart, E. Taciroglu (2018), Development of validated methods for soil-structure analysis of buried structures, Caltrans Final Report, No. CA18-2754

3. E. Esmaeilzadeh Seylabi, W. Zhang, E. Taciroglu (2017), On dynamic responses of underground box structures, 3rd International Conference on Performance-based Design in Earthquake Geotechnical Engineering (PBD-III), Vancouver, Canada, July 16-19