Seismic vulnerability assessment of a set of concrete gravity dams

Since dams are very important structures, vulnerability assessment and evaluation of their safety against destructive phenomena are significant. Vulnerability assessment and prediction of dam’s damage due to earthquake with a variety of intensities can provide helpful information that would be very useful and effective in the proper management of probable crises. One of the useful tools in assessing earthquake damage in concrete dams is the production of their related fragility curves. Due to the vulnerability of concrete dams to tensile cracking, a new concept of damage index (DI) according to tensile cracking has been developed. Also because of dependency of fragility curve to limit states of engineering demand parameters (EDP), limit states have been defined according to tensile cracking in dams. Studies on the production of fragility curves on concrete gravity dams are very limited and mostly not comprehensive in a way fragility curve are normally produced only for one type of dams or with one height and one figuration. In this paper, fragility curves have been plotted for a set of concrete gravity dams, such as Pine Flat, Koyna and Shafarood. Through extensive studies on different sample dams’ structural performances comparisons are made possible using fragility curve.