The utility tunnel is one of the important lifelines.However

the research of its seismic perfor- mance is still at the initial stage.Usually

the utility tunnel is shallowlly buried

so the surface waves

es- pecially the Rayleigh ones

would be the control factor to its failure.This paper puts forward the concept of earthquake of approximate Rayleigh waves.And at the same time

the Rayleigh wave field is obtained with the Fourier’s technique under the assumption that the time history of horizontal component of earth- quake is known.A 3-D finite element model is set up with the software ABAQUS to study the seismic re- sponse of the utility tunnel.From the calculated results

the wave propagation can be seen clearly and the structural deformation is dominated mainly by the bending deformation;the strain at the top point is about 2 times as large as that at the bottom point

which is similar to the character of the Rayleigh waves.