Hydraulic-seasonal-time-based state space model for displacement monitoring of high concrete dams

Displacement is the most intuitive reflection of the comprehensive behavior of concrete dams, especially the time effect displacement, which is a key index for the evaluation of the structural behavior and health status of a dam in long-term service. The main purpose of this paper is to establish a state space model for separating causal components from the measured dam displacement. This approach is conducted by initially proposing two equations, which are the state and observation equations, and model parameters are then optimized by the Kalman filter algorithm. The state equation is derived according to the creep deformation of dam concrete and foundation rock and is used to preliminarily predict the dam time effect displacement. Considering the generally recognized three components of dam displacement, the hydraulic-seasonal-time (HST) model is used to establish the observation equation, which is used to update the time effect displacement. The efficiency and rationality of the established state space model is verified by an engineering example. The results show that the hydraulic component separated by the state space model only contains the instantaneous elastic hydraulic deformation, while the hysteretic elastic hydraulic deformation is divided into the time effect component. The inverted elastic modulus of dam body concrete is an instantaneous value for the state space model but a comprehensive reflection of the instantaneous and hysteretic elastic deformation ability for the HST model, where the hysteretic elastic deformation is a part of the hydraulic component. For the Xiaowan arch dam, the inverted values are 42.9 and 36.7 GPa for the state space model and HST model, respectively. The proposed state space model is useful to improve the interpretation ability of the separated displacement components of concrete dams.