ANALYSIS OF DAM FOUNDED ON MULTIPLE SHEAR SEAMS

Abstract

It is a well known fact that massive structures like dam attract a lot of external interests other than engineering. It may not be always possible to build a dam on safe locations from engineering and. geological point of views. It is, therefore, a necessity to carry out analyses considering unfavorable locations or foundations and study the behavior and assess the safety of structures like dam, having huge destructive potential. A representative dam model has been adopted with multiple shear seams or weaker zones in the foundation. The effect of discontinuity is simulated using the contact or interface elements in FEM (ANSYS) as well as appropriate DEM (UDEC) models. The parameters which have been chosen for the study are the width and the inclination of the seams. The analytical results in the static cases show that Finite Element model can simulate the discontinuity effects well when the results are compared with a Distinct Element model which is considered as a reliable analytical tool to study discontinuous structures. The analytical results, further, indicate that the continuous and the discontinuous models differ in the static and dynamic responses under the loading considered. The parametric variation of the seam width and the seam inclination affects the static and dynamic responses albeit to a limited extent, the overall responses being of the same order.