PERFORMANCE-BASED ANALYSIS OF EARTH DAMS: PROCEDURES AND APPLICATION TO A SAMPLE CASE

摘要

The paper illustrates theoretical and experimental procedures adopted to characterize the seismic response of earth dams by performance-based criteria. The study refers to a real case, the Camastra Dam, a zoned earth dam with vertical clay core, placed in a highly seismic zone of Southern Italy. At first, the analysis objectives have been identified along with the physical quantities needed to achieve them for characterizing dam seismic performance. A theoretical approach, consistent with the identified analysis objectives, has been later selected. The adopted approach is based on continuum mechanics and accounts for coupling between soil skeleton and pore water phase. It is also able to describe the main features of soil response under cyclic loading conditions since it implements an advanced constitutive law for the soil skeleton. Big effort has been paid to the mechanical characterization of the dam materials. In addition to data coming from the interpretation of the laboratory tests performed at the time of dam construction, in situ tests (SASW, Down Hole, DMT) have been recently carried out on the embankment and foundation soils and interpreted consistently with the requirements of the selected theoretical model. Preliminarily, the static stages of the dam lifetime have been numerically simulated to reproduce the behaviour observed in terms of cross-arm settlements and pore water pressures, in order to obtain or verify some soil parameters and initialize the state variables for the simulation of the seismic stages. A seismological study of the dam site provided the expected seismic scenarios in terms of time histories of acceleration, needed as input for the dynamic analyses. The seismic response of the Camastra Dam was finally investigated and discussed in the light of performance-based criteria.