The dynamic and earthquake behaviour of concrete dams: review of experimental behaviour and observational evidence

Knowledge of the dynamic and earthquake behaviour of concrete dams comes from four sources: observations made from actual earthquakes including recorded histories of the dam response, experiments conducted on prototype dams for the purpose of determining their dynamic properties, experiments conducted on model dams including shaking table tests, and analytical investigations. The first three sources are extensively reviewed in this paper, while analytical investigations are included only if they were conducted to establish correlation to earthquake observations or experimental results. The subject of nonlinear constitutive modelling of concrete and foundation materials, together with its large body of experimental data, is omitted. While the review of the indicated subjects is by no means complete, it represents a much greater effort than has previously been attempted. Significant gaps occur with the non-English literature, including Japanese, Chinese and Russian, and with the work performed at ISMES in Italy and LNEC in Portugal which has not appeared to much extent in the earthquake engineering literature. A summary with recommendations for future work follows the review.