Analyses of Thermal Stress Field of High Concrete Dams during the Process of Construction

Currently, in order to adequately exploit the abundant hydropower energy resources in China, a number of high concrete dams are under construction. It is quite prevalent that dams´ cracking caused by inappropriate handling of temperature during the construction process of concrete dams endangers the dams´ safety. Therefore, it is absolutely significant to study the variations of the thermal stress field during the construction process of high concrete dams. Based on Finite Element Method (FEM) software ANSYS 10.0, a newly developed program is edited and applied to study and calculate the non-steady temperature field and the thermal stresses through ANSYS Parametric Design Language (APDL), and verified to be reliable. The thermal stress field during the construction process of Longtan Roller Compacted Concrete (RCC) gravity dam is numerically simulated by the above developed program. The distributions of the thermal stress field and the water-thermal coupling stress field under reservoir normal storage are simulated and analyzed. Some meaningful conclusions are obtained from numerical simulations.