1National Council for Cement & Building Materials, Ballabgarh, Haryana, India
2Dam Safety Rehabilitation Directorate, Central Water Commission, Delhi, India
Online published on 6 February, 2020.
The large dams are associated with certain risk hazards to downstream community, property, and environment at the time of natural extreme events like earthquake and unprecedented flood. These are complicated structures, which are expected to withstand these extreme events without unacceptable damages. Due to ageing, the dam materials are subjected to severe weather impacts that affect the strength and ultimately the operational performance of these structures. Therefore, in order to ensure expected operational performance, comprehensive safety review of such massive structures are warranted. This paper presents one of the case studies of Idukki dam, only arch dam in India under ongoing Dam Rehabilitation and Improvement Project (DRIP) in India. The main objective of this paper is to highlight the findings of various material properties of Idukki dam, use the actual material and other input parameters to establish confidence in the numerical modelling by tallying dam behaviour through outcome of FEM model through instrumentation monitoring. Present study scope was limited to the effect of static and thermal loads for the discontinuous model with galleries for the combination of ambient temperature and water level. The thermo-static analysis results, i.e. displacement vectors from the ABAQUS Package, are in conformation with the observed dam behaviour as per instrumentation data and results are more accurate when the vertical joints are taken into consideration.
