Earthquake response of concrete arch dams: A plastic-damage approach

There are several alternatives to evaluate seismic damage-cracking behavior of concrete arch dams, among which damage theory is the most popular. A more recent option introduced for this purpose is plastic-damage (PD) approach. In this study, a special finite element program coded in 3-D space is developed on the basis of a well-established PD model successfully applied to gravity dams in 2-D plane stress state. The model originally proposed by Lee and Fenves in 1998 relies on isotropic damaged elasticity in combination with isotropic tensile and compressive plasticity to capture inelastic behaviors of concrete in cyclic or dynamic loadings.