Investigation on sensitive warning index of earth dam by use of dimensionality reduction methods

Abstract

The main damage cause of homogeneous earth dams is overtopping failure. In order to uncover the overall change rule of measured data when comes to overtopping failure and to establish foundation for earth dam warning indicators, this paper presents a new exact method of homogeneous earth dam overtopping rushed burst data analysis based on KPCA. Sliding window was used to construct the time series of measured data and two indicators were obtained which were the number of principal components and matrix norm of PCA or KPCA based on the 85% contribution rate. In-situ test showed that, Corresponding dam state deteriorated and final burst, these two indicators increased, decreased, and finally increased. Different size of sliding window and norm calculation shows that the two indicators are not sensitive to the window size and type of norm. Therefore, these two indicators can be taken as the first and second level sensitive warning indicators for the earth dam safety condition.