Crack-Considered Elastic Net Monitoring Model of Concrete Dam Displacement

Displacement monitoring data modeling is important for evaluating the performance and health conditions of concrete dams. Conventional displacement monitoring models of concrete dams decompose the total displacement into the water pressure component, temperature component, and time-dependent component. And the crack-induced displacement is generally incorporated into the time-dependent component, thus weakening the interpretability of the model. In the practical engineering modeling, some significant explaining variables are selected while the others are eliminated by applying commonly used regression methods which occasionally show instability. This paper proposes a crack-considered elastic net monitoring model of concrete dam displacement to improve the interpretability and stability. In this model, the mathematical expression of the crack-induced displacement component is derived through the analysis of large surface crack’s effect on the concrete dam displacement to improve the interpretability of the model. Moreover, the elastic net method with better stability is used to solve the crack-considered displacement monitoring model. Sequentially, the proposed model is applied to analyze the radial displacement of a gravity arch dam. The results demonstrate that the proposed model contributes to more reasonable explaining variables’ selection and better coefficients’ estimation and also indicate better interpretability and higher predictive precision.