Hydrodynamic pressure on dams during earthquakes - approximate formulation

Whenever carrying out safety inspections on dams under construction in officially declared seismic areas or in any zones of this ilk, one must always take into account not only the normal static effects, but also those triggered by the earthquake. This means one must consider both the inertial effect of the structural mass as well as that of the water in the artificial reservoir. In this paper, it is demonstrated that the hydrodynamic pressure values for rigid dams and incompressible liquid are lower than those which can be extrapolated from the models based on the assumption of compressible liquid and both rigid and elastic dams (reservoir-dam interaction) and this observation becomes increasingly relevant the greater the height of the dam above 100 m. Therefore, we propose some simple but technically reliable formulae for the assessment of hydrodynamic pressure both using the assumption of rigid dam and compressible liquid as well as that of dynamic reservoir-dam interaction.