Journal of Engineering Geology

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There are various methods for the analysis of the interactional behavior of the surrounding land, using the lining structure which is the most common method of deigning lining structure tools for the static loads by using the hyper static methods. In recent years, there has been a question that depicts whether this method provides the best results in designing the tunnel structure or not.Due to the nonlinear behavior of the earth surrounding the lining structure, utilizing the lining method could lead to conservative results in the design. If it is possible to somehow find the forces caused by the real behavior of the land surrounding the lining structure influencing the structure and conduct the design based on them, more optimal results would be obtained. This study is based on the actual behavior of the land surrounding the lining structure and the displacement of the structure caused by forces with linear behavior in the static design according to the non-linear behavior of the land around the tunnel structure. The behavior is modeled using the non-linear programs and the forces affecting the lining of the structure will be inference. Also there is a case study based on this method in which the soil interaction with the tunnel analysis and designing the lining structure was first performed and eventually the obtained results were compared with the hyper static method. In this paper, analysis of maintenance system with lower thicknesses considering land-shield, indicated that applying the reinforced concrete with 40cm thickness has the potential to tolerate the applied load but lining with 45cm thickness is capable of tolerating the loads of design and it can be concluded that applying the simulation method combined with the soil and structure besides considering the nonlinear behavior of the soil leads to more economical results in a project. 

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Previous earthquakes have shown that topographic irregularities have significant impacts on the site seismic response and increasing structural damage by amplifying seismic responses. Studies on seismic behavior of slope topographic have shown that dynamic response of free field and soil-structure system is severely on the influence of topography shape and soil properties. Angle and height of slope, frequency of excitation, nonlinear behavior of soil and depth of bedrock are other parameters that affect on the response of the entire system. Furthermore the studies have shown that presence of structure adjacent to slope is very effective on variation of seismic behavior pattern of this topography but these studies are very limited. In this study the effect of existing structure adjacent to slope to seismic behavior pattern of slope topography have been investigated. The parameters that have studied in this article comprise slope angle and frequency content of excitation. The results show that the presence of structure adjacent to the slope, causes an increase to the response of free field and transmitting maximum response to distance away from structure position.

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Introduction
Pressure tunnels in hydroelectric plants are used to convey water to powerhouses. These tunnels are the sources of seepage flow to the rock formation, thus, during the water filling, they will have a low resistance to seepage and, by increasing the internal water pressure of the tunnel, the inflow force will be transferred to the rock mass. In these conditions, the cracks, pores and all other elements of the rock mass are affected by the seepage forces in all directions. This hydro-mechanical interaction affects changing the stresses and displacements of the rock mass around the tunnel and causes modifications in the permeability of rock elements during the water filling. Therefore, changes in stress distribution lead to alterations in the permeability coefficient and redistribution of the seepage field. In these conditions, since the analytical solution of the problem is not possible, the numerical analysis based on the finite element method has been used in this study.
Material and methods
In this approach, the rock mass is considered as an equivalent continuum in which the effects of discontinuities are taken into account in its material behavior. High-pressure tunnels under internal water pressure requires reinforced concrete lining to prevent hydro-fracturing. The ABAQUS software is capable of analyzing such as seepage from the tunnel, modeling of the steel bars in concrete, and taking into account hydro-mechanical interaction. Thus, the software is used for numerical analysis.
The pressure tunnel of the Gotvand dam and hydroelectric power plant (HPP) scheme is taken as a case study for the numerical simulation. Pressure tunnel of the Gotvand dam located in the southwest of Iran is taken as a case study for the numerical simulation. Among behavioral models in the software, Mohr-Coulomb failure criterion is considered to describe the rock mass, but the principle of effective stress determines the rock mass behavior. Since the concrete lining of the pressure tunnel will undergo two mechanisms of the cracking due to tension and the crushing due to compression, concrete damaged plasticity model is used to predict the response of the concrete elements. The evolution of the yield surface of the concrete lining is also controlled with tensile and compressive equivalent plastic strains, correspondingly.
In this study, the hydro-mechanical interaction is implemented based on the analysis of the pore fluid/deformation analysis, and the direct-coupled method is used to solve the governing equations of the problem. To verify the proposed model, the elastic behavior of the media is simulated to compare the numerical and the analytical solutions and good agreement is obtained. The numerical analyses are carried out the hydro-mechanical interaction with constant permeability coefficient. When cracks develop in the concrete lining at high water pressure, the properties of the concrete lining change and as a result, the stress dependent permeability of the lining and surrounding rock mass in pressure tunnels should be considered. The coefficient of permeability controls the rate of seepage flow in porous and fractured media. Although permeability represents an original property of the porous media, it can be modified when subjected to the stress variations. Instead of changing aperture, the change in the void space or volume is the typical consequence that results to change the permeability coefficient. In order to bring the model closer to the real conditions and in the validation of the new model, the influence of the permeability coefficient variations of the concrete and rock mass on the deformations and stresses of the model has been added to nonlinear analysis by USDFLD code. Increasing the water head in the tunnel during water filling is also considered with the combination of DLOAD and DISP codes in the model.
Results and discussion
Since the lining and rock mass have nonlinear properties and complex behavior, for verification of the model in ABAQUS software, the model is simulated with homogeneous, isotropic and elastic behavior. The results of seepage flow on the interface of the concrete lining and rock mass obtained by analytical and numerical solutions indicate that there is a ±5 % difference between them. Then, the results of the elastic behavior of the model show a good agreement with the results of analytical solutions. Therefore, this numerical model has been employed for the nonlinear analyses.
Finally, the optimal thickness of the concrete lining with the appropriate arrangement of the reinforcement in the reinforced concrete linings is utilized to minimize water losses from the tunnel based on the new model. Thus, the results of the analysis with the aim of reducing the water losses from the tunnel indicate that the suitable arrangement of the steel bars in the concrete lining leads to the distribution of micro cracks in the lining, and the reinforcement stress stays at a lower value with high internal water pressure. Based on the new numerical model, it is suggested that the lining should be designed with the thickness of 40 cm and the reinforcement with the diameter of 16 mm and the spacing of 20 cm.
 Conclusion
The results of the numerical model indicate that to control the seepage outflow from concrete-lined pressure tunnels, the thickness of the lining and the suitable arrangement of the steel bars in the concrete lining play a significant role in preventing excessive seepage from the tunnel./files/site1/files/124/3dadashi%DA%86%DA%A9%DB%8C%D8%AF%D9%87.pdf

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Introduction
Concrete faced rockfill dams have been considered in recent years more than other types of dams due to their low dependency on the bed and the shape of the valley, as well as the simpler construction technology. In this regard, rockfill dams are a suitable substitute for embankment dams because of higher stability of the body and the availability of rock aggregates. On the other hand, because the permeability of rock aggregates is much higher than other materials, different methods are used to seal these types of dams. One of these methods is the use of non-impermeable concrete facing in the upstream of these dams. This particular type of gravel dams is called Concrete-Faced Rockfill Dams (CRFD). In this study, a contact element with a definition of elastic-plastic failure in the modeling process is proposed to simulate the surface separation and re-contact of the concrete face with the rockfill surface of the dam.
Method
In this paper, behavior of a concrete faced rockfill dam under earthquake loads is investigated. For this purpose, near-field earthquake records with focal depth lower than 15 km (for example Tabas earthquake 1978, M=7.4, and San Fernando earthquake 1970, M=6.6) are used. Moreover, to study the dam behavior under dynamic loads, interaction between concrete face and rockfill part of the dam is investigated and finally, some parameters including displacement, absorbed energy and base shear are evaluated. So, finite element method and Abaqus software is used for the study. Verification of the models is carried out using the results of previous researches by conducting modal analysis and determining natural vibration period. Then, the interaction between the concrete face and rockfill part as well as the effect of water level changes in stability of dam under dynamic load is investigated. Concrete behavior is simulated using concrete damaged plasticity. Therefore, concrete density, compressive strength and tensile strength and elasticity modulus are 2350 kg/m³, 25 MPa, 3 MPa and 29 GPa, respectively. Poisson’s ratio is assumed to be 0.2. Furthermore, 4-node shell elements are used to simulate concrete face and Drucker-Prager constitutive model is used to define rockfill material behavior.
The density and Poisson’s ratio for 2B, 3C and 3B layers are 2150 kg/m³ and 0.35, respectively. The shear modulus values for these layers are respectively 8.93, 2.89, and 3.85 GPa. In order to perform the simulation, the part of the dam structure beside the bed rock and the surrounding rock is considered as fixed bearing, and only the rockfill part and concrete face of the dam is simulated. Based on this assumption that the bed is rigid, there is no need to consider the dam foundation. This method is frequently used in literature review.
All the surfaces of the dam and bed rock are considered as fixed bearing to simulate the real condition where the dam is attached to bed rock and the surrounding rock. The interaction between dam layers is defined as tie. For defining the interaction between rockfill body and concrete face, tangential and normal contacts are defined using penalty method with friction coefficient equal to 0.5. In the next step, the model is meshed using 4-node shell elements for concrete face, 8-node brick and 4-node pyramid solid elements for rockfill body. Rayleigh damping is used to simulate the structure damping. The effective length of the dam reservoir has been determined by conducting several analyzes, so that the minimum required length for reservoir is reached in order to decrease the number of elements of the model.
Results and discussion
1. Interaction between concrete face and rockfill body
The results show that the increase of friction coefficient between concrete face and rockfill part from 0.5 to 0.7 has not affect the displacement of dam crown along the earthquake direction. However, when the concrete face is fixed to the rockfill part, significant changes are induced in dam crown displacement time history. In all cases, the deflection due to the dam weight is increased when the concrete face is attached to the rockfill body. The reason can be attributed to the tied interaction between these layers which results in similar deflection of concrete face with rockfill body and higher deflection of concrete dam crown. However, after the application of earthquake load, the displacement of the dam crown decreased in both analyses when tie interaction is defined between concrete face and rockfill body. In this study, due to the very high volume of analysis and its timeliness, it was not possible to examine the dam behavior in the free vibration regime, and therefore, it is not possible to assume the last displacement values at the end of analyses as the permanent displacement of dam. Figure 1 shows the relative displacement of the dam for the two selected earthquakes with a friction coefficient equal to 0.5 between the concrete face and the gravel body. According to Figure 1, the maximum displacement induced by the earthquake is related to Tabas and then, San Francisco earthquake. Furthermore, the high energy content of the Tabas record has been more effective in inducing greater displacement than the other record.
 
Figure 1. Lateral displacement of dam crown relative to the dam base for the selected earthquakes; Tabas and San Fernando.
The results also indicate that when the friction coefficient between concrete face and rockfill body is 0.5, the lowest damage occurs in the dam compared to that happens when friction coefficient is 0.7 or when the surfaces are tied. When the tied surfaces are used, the most damages takes place in concrete face, since all rockfill body displacement transmits to concrete face which results in much more concrete damages compared to the other interaction cases.
2. Effect of water level in reservoir on dam behavior
In this section, the effect of water level on seismic behavior of dam is investigated. For this purpose, the dam reservoir is analyzed in three cases including empty, half full and full (90% of dam height). Each study cases are examined under San Fernando and Tabas earthquakes. Figure 2 shows the relative displacement of dam crown in the three water level case for San Fernando and Tabas earthquakes.
 
Figure 2. Relative displacement of dam crown in three water level cases of empty, half and full for (a) Tabas and (b) San Fernando earthquakes
According to Figure 2, for both earthquakes, the dam crown displacement along the earthquake direction is significantly increased by increasing the water level, so that the maximum displacement in full case is 50% higher than empty case.
Conclusion
In this study, using the finite element method and simulation by Abaqus, the seismic behavior of concrete face rockfill dams has been investigated. For this purpose, the verification is firstly carried out using previous research results in literature. In the next step, nonlinear dynamical analysis is carried out, taking into account large displacements for the models under the earthquake record acceleration. The results illustrate that increasing the friction coefficient between the concrete face and the rockfill body from 0.5 to 0.7 has no significant effect on the displacement of the dam crown under earthquake load. Moreover, by using tie interaction between the concrete layer and the rockfill body, there is a substantial difference in the history of the relative displacement of the dam, and the displacement of the dam due to its weight has been increased. Furthermore, the results of this study exhibit that, with increasing the water level in dam reservoir, the deformation of the crown of the dam along the earthquake application direction has had a relatively significant increase, such that in the full state, the maximum displacement is increased by about 50% compared to that of the empty case. This is while the most damage of concrete is observed in the case when half height of dam in filled by water. Due to the more destructive power of near-field earthquakes and their impact nature, only near-fault earthquakes have been used in this research. Therefore, the results of this study are valid only for the behavior of dam under near-field earthquakes.
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Introduction
The discussion of modeling the interaction of soil-pile groups due to a large number of parameters involved in is one of the complex topics and it has been one of the interests to researchers in recent years and has been dealt with in various ways. In recent years, the artificial neural network method has been used in many issues related to geotechnical engineering, including issues related to piles.. In this study, firstly it was tried to explain the importance of soil - structure interaction in calculating the dynamic response of bridges. Then, the effect of different effective parameters in calculating the interaction stiffness of the pile - soil group using artificial neural network was studied.  For this purpose, firstly, Sadr Bridge ( The intersection of Modarress and Kaveh Boulevard because the presence of tallest piers ) in the transverse direction, considering and without considering of the effect of soil - structure interaction was analyzed. The analysis was carried out in which the substructure soil was replaced with a set of springs and dashpots along the piles. Considering the fact that many factors are involved in determining the equivalent stiffness of springs, in the second stage, the effect of different factors on the stiffness of spring equations using artificial neural network was investigated. Finally, the artificial neural network method was used as a suitable method in order to estimate the equivalent stiffness values, the equivalent stiffness of the pile - soil group was introduced for different input values. equivalent stiffness of the substructure soil using the artificial neural network ,has not been used by researchers yet, so estimation of the optimal length and diameter of piles used in constructions and estimating the seismic performance of the bridge system after its implementation could be effective .
Material and methods
In this paper, spring-dashpot method is proposed to the non-uniform analysis of single-pier bridges which led to a 5-degree freedom model in the case of Sadr Bridge. This study also endeavors to investigate the SSI effect in dynamic analysis of bridges. This method is based on the traditional spring-dashpot method but in this method, non-linear stiffness is used along the piles, instead of linear stiffness and upgraded shape functions and coefficients are applied to make more precise mass, stiffness and damping matrices. Then the seismic responses of Sadr Bridge are compared in different conditions including or excluding the SSI effects. Considering the fact that in the present study to calculate the stiffness of the soil-pile group at depth, due to the effect of soil - structure interaction, the recommended method by API is used, the study of neural network analysis was used and the effect of different parameters used to determine the complexity of the soil-pile group system has been evaluated. The multi-layer feeder network, which has the most application in engineering issues, has an input layer, an output layer and one or more layers of hidden content, has been used for this purpose.  The best model of the neural network with a topology of 1-20-6 was provided using the hyperbolic sigmoid activation function, and the Levenberg Marquardt model and the training cycle 84, which had the least error mean square and the best regression coefficient. The effect of internal friction angle, soil density, pile diameter and the resistance per unit length has been evaluated with this method.
Results and discussion
[8] ارائه شده است صورت می پذیرد In this study, the importance of considering the effect of soil - structure interaction on the dynamic response of the Sadr Bridge was studied. Dynamic stiffness of the soil around the pile group was calculated based on the equivalent linear method and using the p-y springs. So, the effect of substructure soil was considered in dynamic analysis of the system . The artificial neural network was used to predict the stiffness of the soil - pile group, based on various input parameters and the stiffness sensitivity analysis of the calculated output values was conducted. In hard soils, the stiffness of the pile - soil group increases with increasing the diameter of the pile in the range of 1 to 1.5 m in diameter. However, in the range of 0.5 to 1 m in diameter, the diameter of the pile does not have much effect on the stiffness of the system and also stiffness decreases in the range of 1.5 to 2 m in diameter by increasing the pile diameter. Soil specific weight and angle of internal friction can change the system stiffness but the effect of the soil specific density is much greater on the stiffness of the soil-pile group system. Generally, the specific density in the range of 1000 to 2300 (kg/m³) will increase the stiffness of the system. In general, the ultimate strength of the soil among 100 to 550 (kN/m) affects the system stiffness. This effect within the ultimate strength between 100 and 220 (kN/m) causes increasing in the interaction stiffness value of the system and in the range of 220 to 550 (kN/m) causes reducing the stiffness of the system . The ultimate strength values ​​in a unit of length outside of the above range have little effect on the system interference stiffness. Despite the fact that the problem of calculating the soil - pile interaction stiffness is a direct solution, the use of the proposed neural network model can help in predicting optimal values ​​of diameter and length of the pile to achieve maximum soil- pile stiffness and especially for long bridges it will has a significant impact on reducing cost and seismic design of the bridge.
Conclusion
The results of this study are as follows:
The results showed that considering the interaction effect, although it increases the relative displacement of the deck, reduces the maximum base shear and moment. This suggests that considering the maximum base shear and moment in the interaction conditions may not lead to a seismic design for certainty, although closer to reality.
Artificial neural network is an efficient way and new method to predict the stiffness of the soil-pile group system based on different input values that have not been used yet. So that with the physical and mechanical properties of the soil as well as the geometric properties of the piles, it is possible to predict the interaction stiffness values with the proper precision.
According to the results and diagrams obtained from the neural network model, which are mainly sinusoidal, the optimal values ​​of the interaction stiffness can be obtained by obtaining the pile diameter, specific gravity, the internal soil friction soil to achieve optimal interaction strength. It is also possible for each site to estimate the depth of the piles in order to achieve optimal hardness. 
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This paper investigates response of triangular shell strip footings situated on the sandy slope. A series of reduced-scale plate load tests were conducted to cover different parameters including three shell footing types with different apex angles in addition to a flat footing, four different distances for strip footings from the crest of the slope namely “edge distance” and reinforcement status (unreinforced and geotextile-reinforced statuses). Bearing capacity of shell footings adjacent to crest of the slope, bearing capacity ratio, shell efficiency factor, influence of apex angle on settlement of footings and the mechanism of slope failure are discussed and evaluated. Also, empirical equations for determination of the maximum bearing capacity of triangular shell strip footings are suggested. As a whole, it has been observed that decrease of shell’s apex angle as good as increase of edge distance could significantly improve the bearing capacity. However, as the edge distance increases, the effect of apex angle on the bearing capacity got decreased. Also, it was found out that the beneficial effect of reinforcement on the bearing capacity decreased with increase of the edge distance. Furthermore, the efficiency of shell footings on bearing capacity was attenuated in reinforced slopes compared to the unreinforced status.

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