Space-Time Finite Element Method for Seismic Analysis of Concrete Dam

Finite element method (FEM) is the most extended approach for analyzing the design of the dams against earthquake motion. In such simulations, time integration schemes are employed to obtain the response of the dam at time tn+1 from the known response at time tn. To this end, it is desirable that such schemes are high-order accurate in time and remain unconditionally stable large time-step size can be employed to decrease the computation cost. Moreover, such schemes should attenuate the high-frequency components from the response of structure being studied. Keeping this in view, this chapter presents the theory of time-discontinuous space-time finite element method (ST/FEM) and its application to obtain the response of dam-reservoir system to seismic loading.