Report

Structural Safety of Cracked Concrete Dams

Updated 2023-06-08 Published 2019-10-24

Here the goal has been to develop a Swedish guideline to define status and both current and future safety level for a cracked concrete dam with the purpose to create a uniform and reliable methodology for condition control and guidance for planning of measures.

Cracks and cracking in concrete dams can give a need to determine the current status from a dam safety perspective and an estimation on remaining service-life taking the cracks into consideration. A comparison between the current status and the formal requirements should be made.

Condition control is a prerequisite to define the current status and future development and to do this there is a need for knowledge on what type of cracks has occurred and the reason for cracking. To do this there is a need to combine observations, sampling, measurements and theoretical models and analysis.

A previous project within Dam Safety Interest Group (DSIG) resulted in a seven- step-method to analyze cracked concrete dams and the current work is taking this forward to adapt the methodology to Swedish conditions.

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About the report

Report number

2019:623

Author

Erik Nordström, Manouchehr Hassanzadeh, Richard Malm, Tomas Ekström, Mårten Janz