Time domain analysis of damreservoir interaction

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to propose a semianalytical method for studying the interaction between reservoir and concrete gravity dams. Designmethodologyapproach The reservoir is assumed to be unbounded at the far end and the solution is sought for incompressible and inviscid fluid. A concrete gravity dam is assumed to behave as a cantilever beam of variable section, and the inclination of the neutral axis is ignored. Findings It is shown that use of the differential quadrature method DQM, with a few grid points in conjunction with the finite difference method FDM, yields an acceptable convergence of results. Comparing the results of the proposed method with those of the literature shows the competency of the method. Originalityvalue DQM for space derivatives and FDM for time derivatives are used to discretize the partial differential equation of motion.