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

Creative Commons License
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

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Apr 29th, 12:00 AM May 4th, 12:00 AM

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.