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Portrait of Amanda Oliveira against a technical drawing of a tower on an annular pile foundation.

PhD candidate · Dynamic soil-structure interaction

Amanda Oliveira

How do a structure, its foundation and dozens of piles move as one system?

Amanda develops unified models of flexible structures supported by interacting pile groups, including the transfer of energy through the soil.

  • IBEM-FEM
  • pile groups
  • contact
  • structural dynamics
An open braced structure on a pile cap, with embedded piles and qualitative waves in a dry-soil cutaway.
Conceptual illustration of dynamic soil-structure interaction. It depicts the research system, not a computed result.

The physical problem

A foundation does not move independently from the structure above it or the soil around it. In a large pile group, every pile influences the others through a three-dimensional wave field.

What the work is building

Her research couples flexible superstructures, arbitrary pile layouts, soil response and contact in one computational formulation. The work includes nonstandard geometries such as ring-shaped pile groups supporting tower-like structures.

Why it matters

More faithful coupling helps engineers identify when a simplified foundation model is adequate and when the interaction itself controls the response.

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Research evidence

Results and current work

Explore published studies, conference contributions and ongoing investigations.

Numbered graphical abstract showing a wind turbine, a coupled pile-soil model and three frequency-response curves. The twelve references are explained in the caption.
Redrafted diagramHow soil flexibility changes a tower's vibration response. Curves adapted from the original graphical abstract; axes omitted here for clarity.

Peer reviewed

Dynamic response of piled structures including pile-soil-pile interaction

The receiving structure changes the vibration field rather than merely observing it. Increasing separation reduces transferred vibration, while structural height shifts the coupled resonances. Pile spacing cannot be reduced to one simple monotonic rule.

Graphical abstract key

  1. Wind-turbine tower
  2. Deformable, wave-radiating soil
  3. Rigid-base approximation
  4. Coupled soil-structure model
  5. Finite-element structural model
  6. Boundary-element foundation-soil model
  7. Energy exchange between piles
  8. Frequency-response comparison
  9. Coupled soil model (teal)
  10. Rigid pile supports (petroleum blue)
  11. Rigid soil base (navy)
  12. Rigid-base overestimate of resonance frequency
Open journal article

Dissertation

Dynamic interaction and energy transfer between piled structures

Amanda's MSc work established the coupled modelling basis that her PhD now extends toward flexible superstructures, arbitrary pile groups and richer contact conditions.

Unicamp repository