Crack identification in hydro-mechanical systems with applications to gravity water dams

摘要

This article investigates an inverse problem for hydro-mechanically coupled systems. The task is to identify damaged zones in water dams out of combined hydrologic and mechanical measurements. Even though water dams are generally well monitored, there is little data available to precisely describe the fluid and stress fields in the structure due to inhomogeneous distributions of the material. Over the lifetime of the dams, which can exceed 100 years, the condition of the structures may change remarkably due to aging, chemical weathering and cracking. Highly fissured regions may arise. Our goal is to identify the damaged zones by comparing the numerically computed fluid and stress fields with measurements along the boundaries. The identification is shown to be an ill-posed problem. For the inversion, regularizing iterative methods need to be applied, in which modified implementations of the Landweber method are used. The computation of the adjoint of the linearization of the parameter-to-solution mapping is done analytically. Due to the consideration of a multi-field problem, numerical results show that the identification results are significantly improved compared to the results of single-field problems.