Seepage analysis through earth-fill dams considering the randomness of the materials used for the construction of dams

Abstract

This study investigates an approach for seepage analysis within earth-fill dams whose hydraulic conductivities of soils are considered as random variables. The strength of this approach is using finite element analysis integrated into a popular software for seepage analysis and a simple algorithm for the random field generation for solving this problem. To study further about this approach, a homogenous dam is used to conduct Monte Carlo simulation. Therefore, the related issues such as the generation of random numbers, the mesh refinement and the number of samples are examined and revealed in the paper.