Application of perfectly matched layers in the transient analysis of dam–reservoir systems

•Employing PML in the transient analysis of dam–reservoir systems.•Boundary conditions of the PML region are involved completely.•Proposing a particular approach to include VGM at the reservoir bottom.•Showing the efficiency of the proposed approach through numerical experiments.

The transient analysis of dam–reservoir systems by employing perfectly matched layers has been investigated. In previous studies, boundary conditions of the PML region in the reservoir have been neglected. In this paper, they are incorporated completely in the formulation. Moreover, a technique is introduced to involve the effect of incident waves caused by vertical ground motions at the reservoir bottom in the analysis. Performing several numerical experiments indicates that applying boundary conditions of the PML domain and utilizing the proposed method for vertical excitation cases reduce the computational cost significantly and make the PML method a very efficient approach for the transient analysis of dam–reservoir systems.