Estimating seepage quantity through homogenous earth-fill dam with horizontal drainage using different methods

Abstract EN

Seepage is the main cause of failure of earthen dams; to prevent this failure, excessive seepage problems should be controlled.

In this study, lowest seepage quantity through homogenous earth dam with horizontal filter by different methods was estimated.

SEEP/W code in (GeoStudio software 2012) and (Slide software 6.025) was used to investigate 972 models with various upstream and downstream face slopes, horizontal filter lengths, free boards, top widths, dam heights and permeability coefficients.

Results showed that, comparing the seepage rates obtained from Slide and GeoStudio softwares has average differences of ratio of seepage discharge to permeability coefficient and filter length (q/kL) was less than 2%.

Furthermore, nonlinear empirical equation was developed using (SPSS 22) program.

The comparison of seepage quantity measured by SEEP/W and Slide versus its quantity calculated from empirical equations gave a coefficient of determination (R2 = 0.815, 0.788) respectively.

Multilinear perceptron (MLP) was used as suitable type of artificial neural network (ANN) with a base structure (5-4-1) in which 75% of data sets were for training and 17.2% were for testing.

The quantity of seepage predicted by ANN compared with obtained seepage rates from SEEP/W and Slide has (R2=0.923, 0.942) respectively.

Finally, the average percent of errors of empirical equation, Slide Program and ANN was 15.814%, 8.519% and 1.060% respectively.

This means that, seepage quantities obtained from ANN was more accurate than other methods may be due to different ways of analysis.