There are various uncertainties in the design, construction, and operation of dams. These uncertainties have an important impact on the seismic response and seismic safety evaluation of concrete dams. In this research, a typical nonoverflow monolith of a concrete gravity dam is selected as a case study for the sliding stability analysis. Based on the analysis and demonstration of parameter sensitivity of friction coefficients and cohesion and their influence on the deep antisliding stability of the dam-foundation system, the probabilistic seismic analysis of a gravity dam-foundation system is carried out through Monte Carlo analysis with a large sample number. Damage levels are defined based on the sliding instability failure mode along with the corresponding threshold values of the damage index. Thus, seismic fragility analysis is investigated, and seismic fragility curves are obtained for the vulnerability assessment under earthquake hazards. The overall seismic stability of the gravity dam is evaluated, which provides the basis for the seismic safety evaluation in the probabilistic framework.
The contraction joints of arch dams with and without shear keys are simplified to be with no-slip condition and with relative sliding condition, respectively. Based on the Lagrange multiplier method, a contact model considering the manner of independent cantilever dead load type with no-slip condition and relative sliding condition is proposed to model the nonlinearities of vertical contraction joins, which is special to the nonlinear analysis of arch dams considering the manner of dead load type. Different from the conventional Gauss iterative method, the strategy of the alternating iterative solution of normal force and tangential force is employed. The parallelization based on overlapping domain decomposition method (ODDM) and explicit message passing using distributed memory parallel computers is employed to improve the computational efficiency. An existing high arch dam with fine finite element model is analyzed to investigate the effect of shear sliding of vertical joints on seismic response of the arch dam. The result shows that the values of maximum principal tensile stress under relative sliding condition are significantly greater than those under no-slip condition.
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