Location
Chicago, Illinois
Date
02 May 2013, 4:00 pm - 6:00 pm
Abstract
Most of the dams in Central United States, built in earlier part of 20th century are hydraulic fill dams. At the time of construction of these dams, earthquake engineering was still in its infancy and hence the dams lacked proper seismic design. Failure or near failure of earth dams as a consequence of earthquakes forced the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to re-evaluate the seismic performance of major earth dams in the Central United States, one of these dams was Sardis Dam. Investigations of Sardis Dam revealed a potentially liquefiable silty clay layer under the upstream shell. It was determined that an earthquake of intensity 7.5 on the Richter scale can cause liquefaction of this weak layer leading to excessive deformations of the dam. Pre-stressed concrete piles were driven to give additional shear resistance to the weak layer. This paper presents a revision of the rehabilitation work at Sardis Dam and a prediction of the performance of rehabilitated dam using limit equilibrium methods. The study verifies the results of deformation analysis carried out using Finite element procedures (TARA-3FL). It is shown that deformation analysis is a useful tool that can be employed reliably to predict the deformations of an embankment dam. The study also shows that the used reinforced zone was very conservative with a factor of safety greater than 2 with negligible seismic induced displacement under the most unfavorable conditions. Therefore it was possible to make the dam safe using less piles and smaller reinforced width which will highly reduce the cost of the remediation work.
Department(s)
Civil, Architectural and Environmental Engineering
Meeting Name
7th Conference of the International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering
Publisher
Missouri University of Science and Technology
Document Version
Final Version
Rights
© 2013 Missouri University of Science and Technology, All rights reserved.
Creative Commons Licensing
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Document Type
Article - Conference proceedings
File Type
text
Language
English
Recommended Citation
Asmar, Randa and Khan, Abdul Qudoos, "Review of the Seismic Retrofitting of Sardis Dam" (2013). International Conference on Case Histories in Geotechnical Engineering. 32.
https://scholarsmine.mst.edu/icchge/7icchge/session03/32
Review of the Seismic Retrofitting of Sardis Dam
Chicago, Illinois
Most of the dams in Central United States, built in earlier part of 20th century are hydraulic fill dams. At the time of construction of these dams, earthquake engineering was still in its infancy and hence the dams lacked proper seismic design. Failure or near failure of earth dams as a consequence of earthquakes forced the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) to re-evaluate the seismic performance of major earth dams in the Central United States, one of these dams was Sardis Dam. Investigations of Sardis Dam revealed a potentially liquefiable silty clay layer under the upstream shell. It was determined that an earthquake of intensity 7.5 on the Richter scale can cause liquefaction of this weak layer leading to excessive deformations of the dam. Pre-stressed concrete piles were driven to give additional shear resistance to the weak layer. This paper presents a revision of the rehabilitation work at Sardis Dam and a prediction of the performance of rehabilitated dam using limit equilibrium methods. The study verifies the results of deformation analysis carried out using Finite element procedures (TARA-3FL). It is shown that deformation analysis is a useful tool that can be employed reliably to predict the deformations of an embankment dam. The study also shows that the used reinforced zone was very conservative with a factor of safety greater than 2 with negligible seismic induced displacement under the most unfavorable conditions. Therefore it was possible to make the dam safe using less piles and smaller reinforced width which will highly reduce the cost of the remediation work.
