Ageing Effects on the Dam-Reservoir-Foundation Interaction Response of the Dez Concrete Arch Dam

In the present study, as a promotion to the previous attempt of the authors and his co-workers, Labibzadeh et. al. [1] the degradation of mass concrete of the Dez dam was evaluated in more detail using a more sophisticated numerical degradation model. In that preceding work, it was demonstrated that the concrete of the Dez dam has been deteriorated and its mechanical properties have been changed after a long time (approximately 45 years) from which the dam is under service. Furthermore, in that attempt, the degraded mechanical properties of the dam were identified using a novel thermo-elastic inverse numerical model developed in that previous research [1]. It should be noted that in that research, it was postulated that this degradation has a homogeneous and isotropic nature. Although the obtained results of some core tests conducted recently on this old dam by a consulting engineering group verified the predicted results obtained from the mentioned above numerical model and confirmed that degradation in general undoubtedly, they could not guarantee the homogeneity and isotropy of this deterioration with the same degree of certainty. Hence, in the first part of this research, the degradation of dam’s concrete was considered as a heterogeneous and anisotropic process and it was decided to investigate the validity of this hypothesis using that numerical model which was developed in previous study [1]. For the sake of brevity, the description of that analytical model (thermo-elastic inverse model) has not discussed again here. But, it should be noted that, in that model, an error or residual function has been defined which plays the principal role in that mentioned above validity process. In other words, it is postulated in this study that if the computed value of the error function from the new proposed Volume 1 Issue 2 2017