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Study of risk acceptance criteria for dams

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Abstract

This paper discusses the methods of establishing risk criteria for dams and reviews the application of dam risk criteria for individuals and societies in different countries or districts. Given the conditions in China and considering the public safety and acceptance of dam risk, historical dam break data and current design standards, individual and societal risk criteria for dams are proposed. The tolerable dam risk criteria for individuals should be set to 10−5–10−7 per annum based on project scale, for example, approximately 1.0×10−7 per annum, which corresponds to a reliability index of 4.2 based on a 100-year lifespan for a first-class or large project. The societal limit for risk tolerance for dams should be set to approximately 10−3–10−5 per annum, corresponding to the fatality range from 1 to 100 and be horizontally extended to 1000, and F-N curves are proposed. It was also found that the reliability indices of Chinese Standard (GB 50199-2013) and Eurocode1 (2002) are different, but they have the same level of safety measured by the annual probability of failure. The research results have significance for establishing dam risk criteria.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Engineering, Xi’an University of Technology, Xi’an, 710048, China

    ShouYi Li & XingBo Zhou

  2. Department of Geotechnical Engineering, China Institute of Water Resources and Hydropower Research, Beijing, 100048, China

    YuJie Wang & ZuYu Chen

  3. Power Construction Corporation of China, Ltd., Beijing, 100048, China

    JianPing Zhou

  4. China Renewable Energy Engineering Institute, Beijing, 100120, China

    XiaoHu Du

Authors
  1. ShouYi Li
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  2. XingBo Zhou
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  3. YuJie Wang
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  4. JianPing Zhou
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  5. XiaoHu Du
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  6. ZuYu Chen
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Correspondence to XingBo Zhou.

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Li, S., Zhou, X., Wang, Y. et al. Study of risk acceptance criteria for dams. Sci. China Technol. Sci. 58, 1263–1271 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-015-5864-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11431-015-5864-6

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