A poromechanical‐damage‐based‐model for water‐driven fracture modeling of concrete gravity dams

Abstract

AbstractWater‐driven fracture propagation is a fundamental issue in the failure analysis of cracked concrete gravity dams. In the present paper, a poromechanical‐damage–based model is proposed to study the water‐fracture interaction in saturated porous media in order to highlight the importance of considering the presence of the pressurized water in propagating fractures. The solid behavior is described by a plastic damage model. The crack openings computation is performed using a post‐processing method combined with the fracture energy regularization concept. The hydraulic behavior is governed by Darcy's law for the un‐cracked material. After cracking, the flow through fracture is driven by the cubic law and the material permeability is increased as the crack propagates. The validations are performed on a wedge splitting test. The failure analysis of a concrete gravity dam under hydraulic fracturing shows that considering the water pressure in cracks leads to deeper and larger fracture propagation.