Acoustic Cavitation Effects on Dynamic Response of Concrete Dam-Reservoir Systems

The present research focuses on the development and verification of a computational procedure and relevant code capable of predicting the water cavitation effects on dynamic response of concrete dam-reservoir coupled systems. Because of the catastrophic consequences of a dam failure, dynamic analysis of dam-reservoir system should include the effects of significant nonlinearities in the response of these systems.
The objectives of this paper are summarized as follow: 1- Present a numerical hybrid model to capture acoustic cavitation in the reservoir of dams. 2- To develop a nonlinear fluid-structure coupling code for studying the water cavitation effects on the response of concrete dam- reservoir system subjected to earthquake ground motion. 3- Perform a study of typical concrete dam-reservoir systems to determine the effects of reservoir cavitation on dam response.
Finally, for investigate water cavitation effects on seismic response of concrete dams; two typical gravity dam- reservoir and arch dam-reservoir systems are modeled. Based on the results presented in this paper the following conclusion can be drawn: 1- The coupling phenomena are found to have great significance in the case of dam– reservoir interaction analysis. 2- Once the cavitation takes place, the interaction process is quite different from what is predicted by a model that does not consider cavitation. Strictly nonlinear phenomenon will dominate and a proper cavitation model is required to define fluid behavior. 3- Reservoir cavitation does not affect the response of concrete dams considerably.