A New Approach for Dam Monitoring and Surveillance Using Blind Source Separation

Usually, dam monitoring systems are based on both boundary conditions (temperature, rainfall, water level, etc.) and structural responses (displacements, rotations, pore pressures, etc.). Statistical analysis tools are widely used to compare the current response of the dam with a whole set of recorded data, in order to determine eventual unwanted behaviors. The main drawback of this approach is that the structural response quantities are related to the external loads using analytical functions, whose parameters do not have physical meaning. In this paper, a new approach, based on Blind Source Separation (BSS) to find out the contributions of the external loads: air temperature and hydrostatic pressure, structure deformation and identify the irreversible component in structural response, is presented. Finally, it presented a case study whose purpose is to assess the separation of the contributions due to the external loads mentioned above without a priori knowledge of the generator phenomena or of the propagation environment, and use only the crest displacements of a concrete dam.