For various special cases in solid mechanics (e.g. plane, cylindrical and spherical waves) one-dimensional formulations in space have been used to derive scalar dynamical stiffness, to establish corresponding rational functions in the frequency-domain and transfer them into the time-domain in order to couple the near- and the far-field.
A complete three-dimensional analysis for pile-groups through a linear homogeneous unbounded soil-domain and the corresponding description in the time-domain have already been treated by Cazzani and Ruge (2012, 2013) by means of a fully matrix-valued rational representation of a set of dynamic stiffness matrices , as a function of the angular frequency . However, the symmetry of the input stiffness has not been maintained for the corresponding representation in the time-domain.
This paper presents a fully matrix-valued rational formulation which does transfer the symmetry of to the corresponding formulation in the time-domain. Thus, the numerical treatment of the whole soil-structure interaction problem, coupling the far-field and near-field systems, can take advantage of algorithms for symmetric algebraic problems.