Dynamic Risk Evaluation and Early Warning of Crest Cracking for High Earth-Rockfill Dams through Bayesian Parameter Updating

Crest cracking is one of the most common damage types for high earth-rockfill dams. Cracking risk of dam crest is closely related to the duration of abnormal deformation state. In this paper, a methodology for dynamic risk evaluation and early warning of crest cracking for high earth-rockfill dams is proposed and mainly consists of: (a) The discrimination of abnormal deformation state related to crest cracking, which is implemented by comparing the crest settlement inclination with the threshold value. (b) Computation of crest cracking probability and estimation of cracking time. The exponential distribution is adopted to represent the probability distribution of the duration TAS of abnormal state before crest cracking. Then the crest cracking probability in a given time can be computed by integration with respect to TAS. Inversely, the cracking time corresponding to a given probability can be estimated. (c) Determination of the values of probability adopted to early warn crest cracking, which are suggested to be selected by statistical analysis of the calculated probabilities at the observed cracking times. (d) Bayesian estimation and updating of probability distribution of the parameter λ in the PDF of TAS, according to observed durations of abnormal state before crest cracking. The methodology is illustrated and verified by the case study for an actual earth-rockfill dam, of which crest cracking and recracking events were observed during the periods of high reservoir level. According to the observed values of TAS, the probability distribution for λ is progressively updated and the dispersion of the distributions of λ gradually decreases. The crest cracking probability increases with the duration of abnormal state and the width of confidence interval of the estimated cracking probability progressively contracts with the updating of the distribution for λ. Finally, the early warning of crest cracking for the dam is investigated by estimating the lower limit of cracking time. It is shown that early warning of crest cracking can be issued from at least 20 days ahead of the occurrence of crest cracking event. The idea of using duration of abnormal state of crest settlement to evaluate crest cracking risk of the earth-rockfill dam in this paper may be applicable to other dams.