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YiLiang Zhou [1] and LingKan Yao [1; 2; 3] and MingYuan Gao [1] and Hongzhou Ai [1]

Academic Editor: Hugo Rodrigues

1, School of Civil Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610031, China, swjtu.edu.cn

2, MOE Key Laboratory of High-Speed Railway Engineering, Southwest Jiaotong University, Chengdu, Sichuan 610031, China, swjtu.edu.cn

3, National Engineering Laboratory for Technology of Geological Disaster Prevention in Land Transportation, Chengdu 610031, China

Received Apr 20, 2017; Revised Jul 18, 2017; Accepted Jul 31, 2017

This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

1. Introduction

The motion of seismic-induced hydraulic structures can generate considerable hydrodynamic pressure on the structural face of a dam, which can significantly affect its stability. Westergaard [1] first derived an expression for the hydrodynamic pressure exerted on the vertical upstream face of a concrete dam subjected to a single harmonic excitation. In fact, many current engineering designs have continued to employ a simplified form of this formula to account for hydrodynamic pressure loads [2–4]. In 1953, Zangar [5] developed an experimental solution for the same problem using an electrical analogue and reported extensive results for a variety of nonvertical upstream faces. Chwang and Housner [6, 7] solved the hydrodynamic pressure problem for a more general dam configuration using the momentum method and two-dimensional (2D) potential flow theory, respectively. Wang et al. [8] modified Westergaard’s equation by considering the influence of dam height, elasticity, and reservoir bottom condition. The results generated by these works were more or less equivalent to the results of Westergaard.

Numerous researchers have studied hydrodynamic pressure under seismic excitation using a variety of other methods to consider the effects of different parameters. Saini et al. [9] employed the finite element method to analyze the 2D response of a reservoir-dam system subjected to horizontal ground motion. When the water was assumed to be incompressible, its effect on the dam was found to be equivalent to that of an added mass. When the water was assumed to be compressible, its effect was found to be equivalent to that of an added mass in conjunction with added damping. Moreover, the coupled response of the system was...

  

   

  

    

  

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