Propagation Attenuation of Plane Waves in Single-Phased Soil by Periodic Pile Barriers

Pile barriers have been broadly used to decrease the effect of ground vibration generated by machines or traffic. In recent years, the periodic theory of solid-state physics was introduced to study the reduction characteristics of periodic pile barriers. In the present paper, a finite-element method based on a partial differential equation (PDE) is introduced to study the propagation and attenuation of plane waves in single-phased soil by pile barriers. In this method, single-phased soil and pile barriers are considered as a periodic system, and the attenuation zones (AZs) of this periodic system are further calculated based on the plane-strain assumption. The influences of soil types and pile configurations on the AZs are comprehensively considered. To verify the existence of AZs using the periodic pile barriers, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional finite periodic pile barrier models were built, and the vibration reduction was analyzed in the frequency domain. After that, based on a practical ambient vibration wave, a periodic pile barrier system was designed, and the isolation effectiveness was verified by numerical simulations in the time domain. The present investigation provides a new method for designing pile barriers to block midfrequency vibration in single-phased soil.