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Affiliation of Author(s):中南大学
Journal:International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics
Funded by:国家自然科学基金
Key Words:heterogeneous earth dams, hydrological state variables, saturated-unsaturated seepage, smoothed finite element method International Journal for Numerical and Analytical Methods in Geomechanics
Abstract:Seepage analysis is the central issue in solving the unconfined seepage problems from complex earth-rock dams. The precision and efficiency of seepage simulation are the major technical barriers to exploring the heterogeneities of hydrological state variables in dams. This paper addresses the heterogeneity of the saturated-unsaturated zones of dams and develops the smoothed finite element method (S-FEM) capable of solving the seepage problem in domains with arbitrary geometry and continuously varied permeability. The gradient smoothing technique, in which the area integrals are transformed into the line integrals around edges of smoothing cells, is used to obtain the element matrices, which is used to simplify the solution of seepage problem. To be specific, we employ van Genuchten method to modify the hydraulic conductivity of unsaturated zones mediumandSignorinicondition to convert the outflow boundary into the water head boundaries. The precision of the proposed method together with the importance of considering the unsaturated zones are first deliberated by the verification tests. Then, to quantify the impacts on the hydrological state variables, wefocus on the heterogeneity of the entire zones through exploratory tests. The results show that the presence of leakage anomalies and auxiliary dam structures has a significant effect on the redistribution of hydrological state variables, which convinces that the findings may lay the foundation for the development of multiparameter seepage inversion and the derivation of coupled hydro-geophysical inversion using the most appropriate starting model.
Co-author:Qianwei Dai, WeiZhou, JunshengYang
First Author:Yi Lei
Indexed by:Journal paper
Correspondence Author:BinZhang
Translation or Not:no
Included Journals:SCI
