FINITE ELEMENT ANALYSIS OF EMBANKMENT DAMS

Abstract

Embankment Dams are the most popular type because of their flexibility and adaptability to all types of foundations, and the fact that modern earth and rock moving equipment utilizing locally available materials make such dams more economical even where other type of dams could be constructed. The Finite Element Method of analysis has been shown to be a powerful tool for the solution of various problems in continuum mechanics. Amongst its many uses are its application to earth dam problems for computing internal deformations, obtaining stress distribution and load transfer within the dam section and location of zones of potential cracking resulting from tensile stresses. The two dimensional analysis (plane strain) of an embankment is applicable to the case of a dam in a wide valley with large length to height ratio. Besides the two dimensional analysis does not provide any information about the location of tensile zones, near abutments and cross valley movements. Three dimensional analyses is, therefore, necessary to study the extent of load transfer to the abutments, location of tensile zones and possibility of transverse cracks, and magnitude of vertical stresses to ensure adequate abutment contact for different valley slopes and embankment heights. A commercially available software package ANSYS 5.4 has been used primarily to take advantage of inbuilt pre-processor and post processor. It is a large scale general purpose package for numerically solving a wide variety of engineering problems. One of them is solving the problems for static and dynamic structural analysis (linear and non - linear).