Safety inspection of large dams in Taiwan is conducted every 5 years. The practice does not take into consideration uncertainty of dam conditions. The goal of this study is to determine the optimal dam inspection interval under the consideration of overtopping risk incorporating uncertainty gate availability. In earlier studies, assessment of overtopping risk only considered the uncertainties in reservoir properties and natural randomness of hydrologic events without giving much thought to the availability of spillway gates. As a result, the overtopping risk could be underestimated. In this study, an innovative concept is proposed to evaluate dam overtopping by taking into account spillway gate availability. The framework consists of three parts: (1) evaluation of conditional overtopping risk for different numbers of malfunctioning spillway gates; (2) evaluation of spillway gate availability; and (3) dam inspection scheduling. Furthermore, considerations are given to overtopping risk, inspection cost, and dam break cost for determining the optimal inspection schedule. The methodology is applied to the Shihmen Reservoir in Taiwan and to evaluate its timedependent overtopping risk. Results show that overtopping risk considering the availability of the spillway gates is higher than the one without considering the availability of the spillway gates.
This study develops a probability-based methodology to evaluate dam overtopping probability that accounts for the uncertainties arising from wind speed and peak flood. A wind speed frequency model and flood frequency analysis, including various distribution types and uncertainties in their parameters, are presented. Furthermore, dam overtopping probabilities based on monthly maximum (MMax) series models are compared with those of the annual maximum (AMax) series models. An efficient sampling scheme, which is a combination of importance sampling (IS) and Latin Hypercube sampling (LHS) methods, is proposed to generate samples of peak flow rate and wind speed especially for rare events. Reservoir routing, which incorporates operation rules, wind setup, and run-up, is used to evaluate dam overtopping probability.
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