Distribution of pore water pressure in an earthen dam considering unsaturated-saturated seepage analysis

Abstract

The variation of pore water pressure in earthen dams plays an important role in maintaining its stability. The pore water pressure within the dam are altered by the external loading conditions like rapid drawdown of reservoir water, earthquake loading and raise of water table caused by infiltration of rainfall. The seepage through an earthen dam involves saturated and unsaturated flows but to avoid complexity in solving the non-linear partial differential equations, the flow in unsaturated zone is neglected and seepage analysis is carried by constructing the flow net in which the pore water pressures beyond the free surface is taken as zero. In actual conditions negative pore water pressure develops beyond the free surface due to the capillarity which leads development to the matrix suction of the soil. In this paper a comparative study on distribution of pore pressure in a zoned earthen dam under steady state and transient conditions had been carried out considering unsaturated-saturated seepage theory. To solve the non-linear partial differential equations, finite element method has been adopted in the present study. The earthen dam has been modeled in different stages. At each stage a new parameter was added and parametric analysis was carried out. The results indicate that negative pore water pressure developed at the downstream side and the pore pressures at the mid-levels of the core are high. This specifies that, soils with low permeability have higher pore pressure. The pore pressures appeared to be higher in upstream side during rapid drawdown compared to steady state.