Deformation health diagnosis of RCC dams considering construction interfaces based on monitoring data and numerical simulation

Abstract The health diagnosis procedure applied to determine the deformation of a roller compacted concrete (RCC) dam is different from that of a conventional concrete dam. Hence, in this study, a deformation health diagnosis model was established for an RCC dam considering the construction interfaces by combining the hydrostatic component simulated using ABAQUS (2016) with the temperature and aging components calculated using a statistical method. The combined method can help monitor the structural health of RCC dam and determine the physical meaning and statistical law of the deformation of RCC dams. During the simulation process, the geometric characteristics of the construction interfaces were modeled using the interface equivalent expansion method. The material properties were modeled using multi-output least-squares support vector regression optimized with the Jaya algorithm. A case study demonstrated that the established deformation health diagnosis model has good fitting and prediction ability. The model and methods proposed in this study provide a new idea for the behavior analysis and numerical simulation of mass composite structures similar to RCC dams.