Assessment of the crest cracks of the Pubugou rockfill dam based on parameters back analysis

Abstract

The crest of the Pubugou central core rockfill dam (CCRD) cracked in the first and second impounding periods. To evaluate the safety of the Pubugou CCRD, an inversion analysis of the constitutive model parameters for rockfill materials is performed based on the in situ deformation monitoring data. The aim of this work is to truly reflect the deformation state of the Pubugou CCRD and determine the causes of the dam crest cracks. A novel real-coded genetic algorithm based upon the differences in gene fragments (DGFX) is proposed. It is used in combination with the radial based function neural network (RBFNN) to perform the parameters back analysis. The simulated settlements show good agreements with the monitoring data, illustrating that the back analysis is reasonable and accurate. Furthermore, the deformation gradient of the dam crest has been analysed. The dam crest has a great possibility of cracking due to the uncoordinated deformation, which agrees well with the field investigation. The deformation gradient decreases to the value lower than the critical one and reaches a stable state after the second full reservoir.