Pore Pressure Effects in Seismic Simulation of an Earth Dam

Abstract

Effective and efficient modeling of soil media is of importance in geotechnical earthquake engineering especially when pore pressure development is considered. Concerning the formulation of the coupled approach, a soil element is presented as a mixture of three constituents -soil grains, water and air in the pores. For the mathematical description of the coupled approach mixture theory is considered including the concept of volume fractions. In application of the model the behavior of an earth dam of a trapezoidal cross section is numerically simulated.