Abstract: In practical application, viscoelastic artificial boundary is featured with such defects as long preprocessing and difficulty of implementation. In view of this, a method of simulating viscoelastic artificial boundary based on thin layer element is proposed. Equivalent viscoelastic boundary element composing thin layer is constructed in light of the principle of element matrix equivalence. By setting the parameter attributes of the equivalent viscoelastic boundary element in finite element software MSC MARC, the artificial viscoelastic boundary can be simulated. A computation example of three-dimensional uniform elastic semi-space and a practical engineering example of concrete gravity dam demonstrate that the calculated results obtained by using the equivalent viscoelastic boundary element are very close to the theoretical solution and the calculated values based on the viscoelastic artificial boundary, with the relative error smaller than 1%. Therefore, the simulated viscoelastic artificial boundary using thin-layer elements has sufficient accuracy and is easy to apply, thus providing a simple and accurate method for seismic analysis in practical engineering.

Key words: thin layer element, stiffness matrix, damping matrix, viscoelastic artificial boundary, dynamic response