Safety Assessment of Cracked Buttress Dams

Sammanfattning: Most of the concrete buttress dams in Sweden were built from the 1950s till the1980s based on the traditional method of analyses. Those structures are reinforced and heavy in structure. Their height to thickness ratio being large makes them prone to crack during their lifespan. The presence of these cracks make the reinforcements used in the buttress dam susceptible to corrosion due to the water entering through the cracked areas. Therefore, studying the effect of cracks and corrosion regarding the safety of dams is important and should be carried out before the dams fail to function. However, only limited researches have been conducted to address these issues. The main goal of this project is to evaluate if the traditional method of analysis were sufficient to capture the failure modes of the dam before and after the occurrence of cracks and corrosion of the reinforcement. In the traditional method, the analytical stability calculations for the factor of safety of sliding and overturning are computed separately. However, in reality, those two failure modes do not occur separately but in combined mode. Therefore, to study this matter, two case studies were considered. In these studies, both finite element analysis (FEA) and analytical calculations were performed to investigate the failure modes. Moreover, this project assesses the influence of cracks and corrosion of reinforcements in the factor of safety. And, the software that was used to carry out the FE analyses were COMSOL and Abaqus. And alongside to FE software, MATLAB was used to carry out the analytical calculations. The results from the analyses showed that the combined failure modes in FE-analyses were the mode of failure of the buttress dams in all cases. Therefore, the analytical calculations were not sufficient to capture the failure modes. Furthermore, the reinforcements that were incorporated in the dam were observed to have a significant effect on the factor of safety depending on the patterns of the cracks. Similarly, the corrosion of the reinforcement had severe effects on the factor of safety based on the crack patterns. Based on the findings from the project, the combined failure mode from FE analysis the governing failure mode, and therefore, traditional analytical methods should be carried out to help evaluate those FE analyses but not to capture the actual failure modes. Besides, the incorporated reinforcements and their corrosion had notable influences on the safety factor of dams which should be investigated carefully.