Abstract
A method for modeling three-dimensional (3D) soil-structure interaction problems in which the unbounded soil domain was treated accurately and efficiently was described. The method combines conventional 3D finite elements in a bounded region near the load-medium interface. It also allows general loading and non-linear material behavior to be modeled with the novel semianalytical the scaled boundary finite-element method, which satisfies the virtual work requirement in the far field. It was shown that an improvement in the accuracy of the elastic solution can be obtained with only a small increase in the number of degrees of freedom in the problem by using the scaled boundary finite-element method to model the far field.