Structural health monitoring of an arch dam from static deformation

This paper presents an investigation of using long-term static deformation measurements for structural health monitoring (SHM) of Fei-Tsui dam, which is located in a very active seismic zone of Taiwan. A modeling technique is developed to characterize the measured static deformation, which is described as a function of the measured physical parameters, where the water level and temperature are the two most important variables affecting dam deformation. The developed modeling method integrates a linear least-squares technique and a nonlinear least-squares process to identify a model by minimizing the residual error between the identified model and the measured static deformation. The proposed modeling technique can also be used for the prediction of the long-term deformation based on the measured water level and temperature for SHM.