Polynomial chaos expansion for uncertainty quantification of dam engineering problems

Uncertainty quantification is an inseparable part of risk assessment in dam engineering. Many probabilistic methods have been developed to deal with random nature of the input parameters or the system itself. In this paper, the polynomial chaos expansion (PCE) is adopted as an effective technique for uncertainty quantification of variety of dam engineering problems (specially with small data sets). Four different case studies are investigated with increasing complexities in which the static and dynamic responses are sought to predict. The limit state functions in the form of implicit and explicit are studied. Uncertainties are propagated in material properties and modeling. Depending on the problem at hand, a validation set from several thousands to couple of hundreds are used. Overall, it is found that the PCE is an effective technique to deal with uncertainty quantification in concrete dams.