Optimum design of concrete gravity dams using sequential quadratic programming algorithm

Abstract

Large dams and their facilities are a part of the infrastructure of any society, and a huge amount of financial and human resources of the community are consumed to build them. Among the various types of dams, optimum design of concrete gravity dams requires special attention because these types of dams require a huge amount of concrete for their construction. In contrast, design optimisation of concrete gravity dams with regard to conditions and limitations, as well as geometric variables, can be complicated. With the appearance of various optimisation methods in recent decades, some researchers have worked on optimum design of dams. The objective of this study is to create an optimum design concrete gravity dam using a new method. For this purpose, a design methodology is proposed. According to the proposed method, a computer program is developed which carries out the optimisation process automatically. Also, numerical problems have been studied and the results obtained by the developed method have been compared to earlier studies in the literature. The results of this research study show that the novel developed method is very effective for the optimum design of gravity dams.