Seismic Safety Evaluation of Concrete Dams Using Damage Mechanics Approach

Abstract eng:
Concerns on the seismic safety of concrete dams have been growing in recent years, This is partly because the population at risk in locations downstream of major dams continues to expand. Also it has increasingly become evident that the seismic design concepts in use at the time when most existing dams were build are inadequate. In this article, an anisotropic damage mechanics approach in Gaussian point level is introduced which models the static and dynamic behavior of mass concrete in 3D space. The proposed numerical model is able to consider non-uniform cracking within the cracked element in Gaussian points. The validity of the proposed model is considered using available experimental and theoretical results. The Morrow Point dam is analyzed including dam-reservoir interaction effects to consider the nonlinear seismic behavior of the dam. It is found that the resulting crack profiles are more localized than those resulting from the smeared crack approach. It can be concluded that the proposed damage mechanics model can be readily used in nonlinear static and dynamic analysis of complex structures and enables engineers to define the damage level of structures. KEYWORD: Concrete dams, Dam-reservoir interaction, Damage mechanics, Dynamic analysis, Non-uniform cracking

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