Assessing the safety of cracked concrete dams

Abstract: AbstractThe overall safety of dams depend on several stipulations. One of them is global stability of the dam, which is addressed with approaches like that in (RIDAS, 2017) (the Swedish power companies’ guidelines for dam safety). When designing a new dam, two global failure modes; sliding and overturning should be considered according to RIDAS. However, this is a simplification and other failure modes may exist, such as the combination of sliding and overturning failure. In this combined mode, the dam typically starts to overturn slightly, then as it looses its contact in the upstream area of the footprint, the dam starts to slide. This combined failure mode is yet to be fully addressed in design codes.One additional failure mode that may occur is an internal failure which is caused by material failure of the dam or where existing cracks govern the failure mode. Reinforced concrete structures are expected to crack and hence it likely that such failure mode may occur. The objective of this report is to understand the behavior of a pre-cracked buttress dam under typical loading conditions, and to analyze potential internal failure modes caused by these cracks. Moreover, the validity of using RIDAS design criteria for evaluating the safety of cracked concrete buttress dams will be examined. Finally, this report will study the influence of various possible cracks to study if these are critical and influence the overall dam safety.The stated objectives were investigated by performing analytical calculations and FE-analyses for three different geometries, where each geometry was analyzed with and without pre-existing cracks. The analytical calculations were carried out using MATLAB, to study the two global failure modes suggested by RIDAS: sliding and overturning for the selected geometries. FE-analyses were performed using BRIGADE Plus 6.2 software, where all geometries were studied for all potential global failure modes, including a combination of sliding and overturning failure modes. When comparing results of uncracked and cracked sections, whether it was obtained analytically or by FE-analyses, the influence of cracks in reducing the overall safety of the structure could be clearly highlighted. Moreover, the results comparing analytical solution using RIDAS and FE-analysis did not follow a uniform pattern, therefore, no concrete results could be concluded and further studies to develop more detailed analytical calculation methods were suggested. Finally, the cracks develop between the inspection gangway and the front-plate was proven to have larger influence on the residual mass of the dam, and thus, the overall safety of the dam.