Seismic Behavior of a Large Embankment Dam under Incoherent Ground Motions

During strong ground motions, long span structures like embankment dams are subjected to non-uniform excitations along their foundation in terms of amplitude, frequency content and arrival time. The objective of this study is (i) to generate the spatially varying ground motion time histories accounting for incoherency and wave passage effect using the most accurate methods suggested in literature and (ii) to compare the earthquake induced deformation and stress responses of Masjed Soleyman earth dam, constructed in Iran, under uniform and nonuniform multi support excitation.

Keywords:

Seismic response , earth dam , spatial variability , coherency loss , wave passage