Soil Structure Interaction on Spillway Walls Adjacent to Embankments

An extremely important aspect of the analyses of an embankment dam with a gated concrete spillway is the interaction of soil with the spillway walls during a seismic event. If the soil load becomes too great, the concrete spillway retaining wall may fail, opening up a large seepage path between the failed wall and the soil behind it, leading to erosion of the soil and, eventually, the entire dam. A more rigorous approach is required to evaluate seismic loads on concrete spillways other than traditional pseudostatic methods. This research will propose the use of the LSDYNA finite element code to model spillway walls with soil behind them in order to achieve this and will validate this code against results from centrifuge experiments at Berkeley.