Novel Developments and Findings for the Safety Assessment of Earthquake-Excited Dam-Reservoir Systems

Abstract eng:
Many dams worldwide have been in service over 50 years and are located in high seismicity areas. The initial seismic design of these critical structures was generally conducted using simplified methods that do not fully take into account of the dynamic nature of earthquake excitation and the complex fluid-structure interaction. Although significant work has been done to evaluate the seismic response of dams, there is still a need to improve commonly used simplified methods and to accurately assess the efficiency of more sophisticated ones. The first part of this paper proposes new practical formulas to evaluate earthquake-induced hydrodynamic loading on concrete dams. This original technique generalizes the classical added-mass formulation by including the effects of dam flexibility and reservoir bottom absorption. Frequency response functions of hydrodynamic pressures within the reservoir are compared to analytical solutions. It is shown that the method accurately predicts hydrodynamic loads and that it can be easily implemented in a computer program or a spreadsheet. The second part of the paper investigates finite element modeling aspects to assess the seismic performance of concrete dams. Several finite element models of dam-reservoir systems with various dimensions are used to conduct frequency and time domain analyses. Potential-based fluid elements and viscous boundary conditions are validated against analytical solutions and they are shown to perform adequately for practical seismic analysis of dam-reservoir systems.

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