The purpose of this paper is to present shake table experiments conducted on four 3.4 m high plain concrete gravity dam models to study their dynamic cracking and sliding responses. The experimental results are then compared with a smeared cracked FE simulation using a nonlinear concrete constitutive model, based on fracture mechanics. For the sliding mechanism, the numerical simulations use rigid body dynamics with frictional strength derived from the Mohr-Coulomb criterion. From the cracking tests, it is shown that a single triangular acceleration pulse could initiate a crack and propagate it. For the sliding mechanism, it is shown that the cumulative sliding displacement depends on the frequency content of the seismic record. For simplified pseudo-static/dynamic sliding analyses, the concept of an effective acceleration is developed.
展开▼
