Settlement Monitoring and Analysis of Changheba Dam with the Application of Terrestrial Laser Scanning

Settlement deformation distribution and evolution has an important impact on the stability of the earth-rock dam during dam construction process. In contrast to traditional single-point monitoring, the terrestrial laser scanning (TLS) has an advantage of presenting the changes in shape for the whole object, through scanning and creating the accurate and detailed geometric models. By using TLS technology, the high resolution digital elevation models (DEM) of the Changheba dam is re-constructed, and the settlement deformation between two respective DEMs and their distributions are calculated. Deformation distribution characteristics indicated that, the settlements in the middle are general bigger than the values in both sides near the banks, and the settlements are increase with the increasing of the elevations. Monitoring results also show that, the application of TLS permits a better understanding of distribution and evolution of settlement deformation for the dam during construction process.