Damage identification in gravity dams using dynamic coupled hydro-mechanical XFEM

Abstract

In order to maximize efficiency and reduce the risk of failure in operational dams, an effective and efficient method which employs the inverse analysis of a dynamic coupled hydro-mechanical problem is proposed. The numerical model is based on the extended finite element model. The proposed method is able to identify cracks which may be detrimental to structural performance and reliability. An attempt is made using both deterministic and heuristic based strategies to solve the ill-posed inverse problem and identify the location, dimension and orientation of the crack. More so, the influence of the search space and conditioning of the cost function in identifying crack parameters are investigated. The proposed method shows promising results in the identification of cracks in a fully operational dam.

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