Page - 1020 - in Book of Full Papers - Symposium Hydro Engineering

COMMISSION INTERNATIONALE DES GRANDS BARRAGES ------- VINGT-SIXIÈME CONGRÈS DES GRANDS BARRAGES Autriche, juillet 2018 ------- ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION OF THE BAIXO SABOR DAM’S BEHAVIOUR DURING THE FIRST FILLING OF THE RESERVOIR José PITEIRA GOMES 1, António L. BATISTA 1, D. SILVA MATOS 2 1 LNEC – National Laboratory for Civil Engineering, Lisbon 2 EDP Gestão da Produção de Energia S.A., Oporto PORTUGAL 1. INTRODUCTION The failure of dams with large reservoirs can be the cause of catastrophic accidents with very important losses of human lives and of material and environmental assets. For these reasons, the safety control of these constructions is regulated and followed by national authorities, considering the structural, hydraulic-operational and environmental aspects. In Portugal, the national authority is technically helped, with the dams that involve major risks, by the National Laboratory for Civil Engineering (LNEC). The structural safety control of dams begins in the design phase and ends only with its decommissioning. This control is based on regular inspections and on the comparison between monitoring data, obtained through the instrumentation installed according to the monitoring plan (defined during the design phase and updated during the dam’s lifetime), and results of models, usually numerical ones, considering the most important characteristics of the structures, such as the geometry and the material properties, and the main actions. The first filling of the reservoir, as a load test for the real operational conditions of the dam-foundation-reservoir system, requires special monitoring. The safety control activities during this period are very important not only to avoid accidents and incidents, but also to acquire knowledge about the structural 1020