ABSTRACT
ABSTRACT Dams play a major role in the development and sustenance of communities, economies and civilizations. Apart from being exposed to a variety of dynamic forces (ambient and induced), many dams today have been in operation beyond their design life cycle and thus uncertainty and deterioration in the material properties would be expected. Dam failure is in most cases catastrophic, thus, a strict and frequent monitoring routine is required for the early detection of damages and reduction of the failure risk. Owing to the physical scale of the dams, application of traditional monitoring techniques are cumbersome, time-consuming and expensive. To overcome this challenge, we propose a method which involves the propagation of mechanical/seismic waves to probe the dam structure. The material properties of the structure are obtained, using inverse analysis techniques, from the mathematical reconstruction of the wave behavior in the structure. Besides being an effective and efficient damage identification technique, the proposed method is able to leverage on structural health monitoring instrumentation in existing dams, thus making the method economically viable.
