FORMULACIÓN DE UNA CIMENTACIÓN SUPERFICIAL EN SUELO ARCILLOSO CONSIDERANDO INTERACCIÓN SUELO-ESTRUCTURA E IMPLEMENTACIÓN EN UN CÓDIGO DE ELEMENTOS FINITOS

The numerical modeling of structures is carried out in order to estimate the real structural response of a system; in the measure that these models predict the structural behavior of each component with a better approximation, it will be possible to improve the structural design of the system. In the case of constructions resting on clay soils, the difficulty for predicting their structural response resides in how to model the non lineal behavior of the soil. One possibility of numerical analysis of this problem is by using the Finite Element Method (FEM), in which a model can be built with solid or shell elements to represent the slab of the isolated foundation and solid elements to represent the underlying soil, taken into account a set of layers defined between foundation bottom and the top of the hard stratum; nevertheless, this work implies an excessive and expensive complexity even for relatively simple structures. By these reasons, for a standard structural engineer it would be better to have a simpler efficient mechanism for classical numerical models, which will be able to incorporate in a simple way the complex non lineal behavior of isolated foundation resting on clay soils. In this work it is proposed a simplified numerical strategy that includes a super element called "Isolated Foundation element" IFE, which has been formulated and implemented in a conventional program for structural analysis; the iterative method converges fast and it could easily be implemented in a standard finite element code without modifying the internal computational structure of the program. In the practice, a user will be able to incorporate the IFE in its structural model, indicating some parameters and the nodal point where this super element is required