Construction Quality Monitoring of Embankment Dams Using Pore Water Pressure The Case of Kesem Dam
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Date
2014-11
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
Monitoring pore water pressure within earth and rock fill dams has been practiced extensively with safety probably being the first and the most important reason for it. The overall objective of the research is to propose construction quality monitoring technique in embankment dams using pore water pressure by taking Kesem dam.
For Kesem dam, the construction quality monitoring was done by making sure that an arbitrary core sample tested in a laboratory has brought about the expected hydraulic conductivity. Such approach seldom represents the whole core safety for the expected hydraulic conductivity. This research has used the pore pressures measured in the sensors located inside the core of the dam. Seepage flow inside an embankment dam can be predicted using SEEP/W software. However, this model needs accurate hydraulic conductivity value, which is very difficult/costly to obtain. As long as dam monitoring is concerned accurate prediction of pore pressures is required. To make sure that such needed accuracy is obtained a two phase modeling is proposed in this study. At first, SEEP/W will predict a pore pressure at sensor locations for different values of hydraulic conductivity. These predicted values together with the reservoir water level are then used as an input to a Multiple Linear Regression (MLR) model. The coefficients of multiple linear regression models are estimated by making use of previously measured pore pressure values at the sensors.
The coefficients obtained have resulted in an R2 value of nearly unity. This indicates the result of the pore water pressure in the piezometric areas from the model is almost the same as the result obtained from the recorded data. Hence, it can be concluded that the technique of construction quality monitoring used in Kesem dam has promising application if used.
Key words
Embankment Dam Construction Monitoring, Kesem Dam, Pore water pressure, SEEP/W, Reservoir water level, Hydraulic conductivity, Pore pressure sensor, MLR
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Keywords
Embankment Dam Construction Monitoring, Kesem Dam, Pore Water Pressure, Seep/W, Reservoir Water Level, Hydraulic Conductivity, Pore Pressure Sensor, MLR