Stress Analysis in Concrete with Cooling Pipes

A substructure method of finite element analysis is adopted in this paper to simulate heat transfer and thermal stresses in a concrete dam. The massive concrete structure is cooled by embedded cooling water pipes. One-dimensional pipe elements are used to simulate the cooling pipes. These pipe elements couple with a computed plane on which the two-dimensional thermal and stress analyses are carried out. Sizes of the computing problems are much reduced using the substructure method. The results of a numerical example have shown that the temperatures of the concrete dam structure can be controlled effectively using the cooling pipes during its construction.