CROSS-SECTION OPTIMIZATION OF CONCRETE GRAVITY DAMS USING GENETIC ALGORITHMS

Abstract

Concrete gravity dams are the most commonly used hydraulic structures in engineering, for the designer these structures, the overall stability (external forces) must be guaranteed as well as the internal stresses that element is subjected to. The scaling mechanisms these structures are presented in the manual Critérios de Projeto Civil de Usinas Hidroelétricas (2003) from Eletrobras, which is strongly influenced by the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation (1976). After an analysis of the proposed design forms, it was observed a tendency to oversize these structures, in order to reduce this oversizing and to obtain slender forms of dam, the present work brings an optimization study for the cross sections of concrete gravity dams, this optimization will be made by means of routines used in Matlab software, the genetic algorithm technique will be used to reduce the cross-section of this type of dam and consequently reduce the volume of concrete used in its construction.

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