The Earthquake Engineering Online Archive

EACD-3D-96: a computer program for three-dimensional earthquake analysis of concrete dams

Tan, Hanchen; Chopra, Anil K.

UCB/SEMM-1996/06, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, University of California, Berkeley, 1996-10, 131 pages (500/C23/96/06)

The computer program EACD-3D, originally developed in 1986, implements the analytical procedure for three-dimensional analysis of earthquake response of concrete dams including the effects of dam-water interaction, water compressibility, reservoir boundary absorption due to alluvium and sediments at the bottom and possibly at sides of actual reservoirs. The flexibility of the foundation rock is included in the computer analysis but its inertia and damping effects were ignored. The response analysis procedure has recently been extended to include the inertia and damping effects of the foundation rock. Thus, the various effects of dam-foundation rock interaction -- including the effects of foundation flexibility, inertia, material damping, and radiation damping arising from the interaction -- are included in the analysis. The computer program EACD-3D has been modified and extended to EACD-3D-96 to implement this new procedure. As before, the dam and fluid domain substructures are modeled by three-dimensional finite elements; however, the foundation rock region is modeled by boundary elements on the surface of the canyon along the dam-foundation rock interface. The number of boundary elements needed is considerably smaller than the number of finite elements required in EACD-3D to model the huge foundation rock region. Furthermore, these surface boundary elements are much easier to generate than three-dimensional finite elements.

Available online: http://nisee.berkeley.edu/documents/SEMM/SEMM-96-06.pdf (9 MB)