Seismic Response of Ambar Dam to Recorded Earthquake

Water and energy supplies are the key factors affecting the economic development and environmental improvement of Turkey. Given their important role and the fact that a large part of Turkey is in seismically active zones dams should be accurately analyzed since failure could have a serious impact on the local population environment and on a wider level could affect the economy. In this paper, a procedure is proposed for the static, slope stability, seepage and dynamic analysis of an earth dam and the Ambar embankment dam. The acceleration time history and maximum horizontal peak ground accelerations of the Bingol (2003) earthquake data was used based on Maximum Design Earthquake (MDE) data. Numerical analysis showed that, the Ambar dam is likely to experience moderate deformations during the design earthquake but will remain stable after the earthquake. The result also indicated that, non-linear analysis capable of capturing dominant non-linear mechanism can be used to assess the stability of embankment dams.