Reservoir hydrostatic pressure effect on roller compacted concrete (RCC) dams

The number of Roller Compacted Concrete (RCC) dams has increased substantially during the last two decades primarily due to the advantages of RCC. The main challenging issue in the design of RCC dams is evaluating the RCC dams' response during earthquake excitations. One of the effective factors in seismic response of RCC dams is hydrostatic pressure due to reservoir water. Therefore, in this paper, an attempt is made to investigate the effect of reservoir hydrostatic pressure on RCC dams and subsequently evaluate damages and crack propagation. For this purpose, Kinta RCC dam in Malaysia constructed in 2002 is considered as an appropriate case study. Seismic analysis is conducted by applying earthquake accelerations. For this purpose, the finite element model (FEM) of the RCC dam is made and a bidirectional time history accelerations are applied to the RCC dam with and without considering the hydrostatic pressure effect. The obtained results show that, the hydrostatic pressure increases stress (25%) and changes the displacement response of the dam from negative to positive direction. In addition to these, hydrostatic pressure causes damage at heel elements.