Impedance functions associated with horizontal and vertical vibrations of rigid massless strip footings embedded in a saturated soil stratum are evaluated using a finite element approach The foundation medium is treated as a two-phase continuum which behaves according to Blot`s classical theory of wave propagation in fluid-saturated porous media. Parametric studies have been recently performed by the authors in an effort to verify that the adopted finite element approach and associated numerical procedures yield reasonable correlations with analytic solutions of soil-structure interaction problems. Horizontal and vertical impedance functions are presented for various embedment depth/soil layer thickness configurations. It is shown that saturation influences the foundation impedances especially their imaginary parts which can be reasonably explained as being the result of additional dissipation in the system associated with the motion of pore fluid relative to the soil skeleton. It is further shown that, as anticipated, soil stiffnesses increase with increasing embedment depth
