Evaluation of the hydraulic behaviour of concrete dam foundations using back-analysis

摘要

The evaluation of the hydraulic characteristics of concrete dam foundations is an important issue for the assessment of their safety conditions due to the alterations that can occur during the lifetime of these structures and to the important dependence between the water flow and the state of the stresses in the rock mass. For these reasons, it is of great interest to have results of characterization tests during the dams lifetime and for different levels of stresses in the rock mass. In this paper an alternative approach based on the back-analysis of the monitoring data obtained during the dam operation is presented. The methodology is applied to the identification of permeability of the rock mass foundation of a gravity concrete dam using seepage and uplift data.