Date of Award

Spring 2025

Document Type

Thesis

Publisher

Santa Clara : Santa Clara University, 2025

Department

Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering

First Advisor

Rocio Segura

Abstract

Dams play a critical role in water supply, flood control, energy generation, and infrastructure resilience. However, many existing dams face significant risks due to aging structures, evolving environmental conditions, and outdated design methodologies. These dams pose a danger to downstream populations, demanding greater attention to investment in measures to help reduce risks to public safety and economic assets. Traditional deterministic methods for dam stability assessments rely on static factors of safety (FS), often resulting in either overly conservative or underestimated designs. In this approach, engineers input known material properties, loads, and the dam's geometry into a single FS, which is compared to reference values to evaluate stability. While effective for quick analyses, this method overlooks uncertainties, potentially leading to overly conservative designs or neglect of critical safety aspects. Probabilistic methods provide a more comprehensive foundation for risk evaluation by quantifying the likelihood of not reaching a target performance objective rather than relying on a single safety factor threshold. This study focuses on analyzing the resiliency of a 326-foot Hardfill dam, under various loads (normal, unusual, and extreme) by bridging probabilistic and deterministic analyses to create a function that can predict the FS. The study integrates sensitivity analysis using Tornado Diagrams (TD) to identify critical parameters influencing stability, while providing a visual tool for practicing engineers. CADAM3D is the computer software used for the deterministic analysis and MATLAB for probabilistic analysis, allowing for a comparative assessment between traditional and probabilistic design approaches. This analysis involves a multi-linear regression approach to derive a straightforward equation for the estimation of the factor of safety, which includes parameters identified using the TD. The proposed procedure is more robust, computationally efficient, and more easily interpretable than conventional methods while accounting for uncertainties in the analysis. This study will allow professionals in the dam industry and dam owners to expedite the safety assessment of similar dams and to identify the parameter uncertainties affecting the dam response the most to allow for designs or retrofit strategies that are cost-effective.

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