Assessment of dam safety using the approximate entropy method

One of the most important research focuses in today's dam engineering is related to health monitoring of reservoir dams. A novel method named Approximate Entropy (ApEn) is introduced to evaluate the operation condition of gravity dam by monitoring data in this paper, which has been proved to be very successful while applied in many other disciplines, such as the fields of economics, medicals and mechanical, etc. The theoretical framework of ApEn together with a modified programming algorithm are proposed first, and then a quantitative relationship between the horizontal displacement of 14 different measure points located on a practical gravity dam is established. The results of the practical applications have shown that ApEn can effectively and efficiently diagnose the health state of the dam, with high robustness and strong ability to resist noise.