Structural inverse analysis of concrete dams: considering residual hydration heat effect on dam displacements

This paper studies the macro effect of residual hydration heat on dam displacements and the application of the metaheuristic algorithm in structural inverse analysis. Based on the one-dimension heat equation, this paper proposes an extended statistical model concerning the hydration heat effect for dam health monitoring, in which the measured dam displacements are divided into hydrostatic, seasonal temperature, hydration heat, and aging components. A hybrid optimization algorithm is presented, which combines an improved particle swarm optimization (IPSO) with a beta differential evolution algorithm (BDE) and uses an annealing factor to adjust the percentage of use of IPSO and BDE. The monitoring data of a roller compacted concrete dam were taken as an example to verify the extended statistical model. The results demonstrate that the proposed hydration heat formulation is able to capture the long-term effect of residual hydration heat on dam displacements and the dissipation process of the residual hydration heat causes an increasing displacement upstream with time. Based on the results of the structural inverse analysis, the hydrostatic and seasonal components of dam displacements predicted by the finite element model are in excellent agreement with the ones separated by the statistical model, respectively.