Font Size: 

Unlike superstructure, it is necessary to bury underground structure model into model soil carried by a continuum model box, when conducting shaking table test under non-uniform excitation. The problem, how to transmit dynamic effectively between different shaking tables is need to be solved firstly. The present paper is devoted to study the effectiveness of continuum model box using when conducting non-uniform excitation shaking table test. A full-scale 3D entity finite element model of soil and model boxes is simulated. In order to avoid the randomness of calculation result, three conventional coherency models are adopted to synthetize non-uniform ground motions respectively. In order to evaluate the effectiveness of continuum model box, the calculation results, including time history and frequency spectrum of soil acceleration responses, are contrasted with those of 2D free field analysis. The calculation results show that the distribution of peak acceleration response of soil cased in the continuum model box is almost the same as that of 2D free field analysis. The Fourier Amplitudes of the surface acceleration responses of soil state that the frequency spectrum components of soil acceleration response have little difference between 3D dynamic analysis and 2D free field analysis. Thus, it is rational to adopt continuum model box with rigid connection to conduct shaking table test of underground structure under non-uniform excitation.