Earthquake safety analyses of gravity dams: Comparison of different approaches

The Earthquake safety analyses of dams can be conducted using dynamic or quasistatic approaches. The chosen approach can improve the description of the dam's vibration behaviour but at the expense of calculating effort. Comparing the stress distributions of a medium size gravity dam under earthquake load resulting from numerical simulations with ANSYS, the transient approach provides more conservative results than the simplified approaches of the response spectrum method and the pseudostatic approach with equivalent loads.