DYNAMIC RESPONSE AND STABILITY ANALYSES OF AKOSOMBO DAM USING NUMERICAL ANALYSIS

Dams are very important in Ghanas economic development and environmental improvement. Although Ghana dams are seismically far from the active zone, accurately analysed dams should be evaluated since failure could severely impact the people in the flood environment and the regions economy on a large scale. This paper proposes a numerical procedure for the static, slope stability, and dynamic analysis of the Akosombo embankment dam. Nineteen horizontal acceleration time histories recorded data was used based on Maximum Design Earthquake (MDE), Maximum Credible Earthquake (MCE), Design Basis Earthquake (DBE) and Operating Basis Earthquake (OBE) data. The numerical results estimated showed that the Akosombo embankment dam is likely to experience moderate deformations during the different design earthquakes. The result also indicated that non-linear analysis capable of capturing dominant non-linear mechanisms could be used to assess the stability of embankment dams. The factor of safety (FS) calculated was greater than 1.5 for high reservoir, rapid drawdown condition and low reservoir condition whereas, the FS values were found to be 1.42 for slow drawdown condition.