Soil-structure interaction issues in complex environments: the example of a 250 m high chimney.

Soil-structure interactions must be properly accounted for also in the assessment of structure vulnerability to seismic inputs. This is particularly true in the case of very large structures where the vibrational response of the structure itself can propagate to the soil also under standard conditions, when the characterization of the soil response is generally carried out. In this contribution we demonstrate how only an integrated approach making use of all available soil characterization techniques (namely MASW, ReMi and HVSR) allows for a correct analysis of the recorded data, eliminating the effects caused by the vibrations caused by the structure itself, and thus focusing only on the soil response itself. In absence of such data integration, directional noise coming from the structure vibration itself may cause gross misunderstanding of the soil characteristics both in terms of soil Vs and natural frequency.