SEEPAGE MODELING THROUGH EARTHFILL DAM USING STOCHASTIC FINITE ELEMENT METHOD SFEM

Even though soil permeability varies randomly from point to point in space, the analysis of flow through earth dams typically proceeds deterministically and results can sometimes be misleading. In this paper the soil permeability in an earth dam is viewed as spatially random field with prescribed mean, coefficient of variation, and scale of fluctuation. A parametric study on two earth dam sections is carried out for estimating the mean and standard deviation of the total flow rate through the dam and free surface drawdown. The model of First Order Second Moment FOSM is used to approximate the Stochastic Finite Element equations in order to evaluate the significant of stochastic modeling of such a random system. The results showed that each of the flux rate and free surface drawdown variability is increased continuously by increasing the variability of permeability for all considered scale of fluctuations. However they have varied values for each value of scale of fluctuation.