Evaluation of Seismic Wave Propagation in the Analysis of Concrete Dams: Pine Flat Dam Benchmark Study

Abstract

The paper presents both a discussion of and results from a structural analysis conducted for Pine Flat Dam as formulated for Theme A of the 15th International Committee on Large Dams (ICOLD) International Benchmark Workshop on Numerical Analysis of Dams. The primary focus of this paper is to examine some basic problems that can arise when using reduced-domain models of a semi-infinite medium. We explore the use of two finite element (FE) codes to model seismic wave propagations in an elastic medium, and we evaluate their accuracy for some simple simulations where the answer is known a priori. We show that significant errors can arise due to the absence of the free-field boundary condition in FE simulations of elastic wave propagation.