77. Shear Seam in Dam Foundation System

Dams are the hydraulic structures built with impervious material across river which provides water impounding for various purposes. These structures are constructed on rock formation so proper stress deformation analysis should be done. So it is important to analyze different stress concentration which results into undesirable deformation in dam foundation system. The paper presents analysis of dam foundation system under the shear seam using explicit finite difference method. Seams not only change the physical properties of the rock in and near the discontinuous zones, but they substantially affect the distribution of stresses and the overall stability of dam foundation. With different inclination of seam, stress deformation is concluded in the dam foundation system. These seams originate from the heel and software used for the analyses is FLAC 3D (Fast Lagrangian Analysis of Continua in 3 Dimensions). From the study it was concluded that the most critical case is the dam-foundation system with 120° inclined shear seam.