Abstract
The civil engineering projects, like nuclear installations, submitted to vibrations or seismic motions, require the study of the soil behaviour underlying the site under intensive dynamic loading. In order to understand in depth the soil damping phenomenon, a propagation of a shear seismic wave in a dissipative medium has been numerically simulated. The computer code, based on a nonlinear hysteretic model using Newmark-Wilson and Newton-Raphson algorithms and variable spatial steps, passes through the difficulties related to acceleration discontinuities. The simulation should allow the identification of the soil parameters by comparison with in situ measures.