Effect of ground-motion asynchronism on the equivalent acceleration of earth dams

Under seismic loads the deformability of an earth dam may induce several effects, including ground-motion amplification and asynchronism between different points of the dam embankment. The paper analyses the asynchronous effects occurring in two existing earth dams, representing well-documented case histories: the El Infiernillo Dam (Mexico) and the Camastra Dam (Italy). Asynchronous effects are analysed by theoretical predictions of the dam seismic response by adopting an advanced dynamic approach, which takes into account the main features that dam soils exhibit under cyclic loading conditions. For different potentially unstable masses within the dam embankment, equivalent accelerations were computed as the ratio between the resultant of the inertial forces and the weight of the volume V associated to the unstable mass. With the exception of very cortical sliding surfaces – not significant for dam stability – in most of the analysed cases the equivalent seismic coefficients do not exceed the peak acceleration at the dam base.