Seismic Analyses of Menta Embankment Dam: An Elasto-Plastic Model with a Stress-Strain Dependent Stiffness and a Composite Yielding Surface

Abstract

In this paper, a seismic analysis of the Menta dam is briefly described. The Menta dam is a bituminous-faced rockfill dam located in Southern Italy, lying in the heart of Aspromonte Massif at an elevation of about 1400 m a.s.l. The embankment is about 90 m high at its deepest point, and the reservoir impounds 1.8 × 107 m3 of water. This dam was designed in the late seventies and built between 1987 and 2000. In the seismic analysis, the dam material has been modelled with an elasto-plastic constitutive law which is characterized by a Young’s modulus dependent on the stress level and on the distortional strain and by a curvilinear yielding surface. Both the calibration of the model and the dynamic analysis has been carried out by means of the FDM code FLAC (Fast Lagrangian Analysis of Continua [1]) version 8.1 which adopts an explicit time-integration scheme.