Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Chau-Ping, Yang
Department of Civil Engineering and Engineering Informatics, Chung-Hau University,
30 Tung Shiang, Hsinchu, Taiwan, 30067, E-mail address: ycp@chu.edu.tw
Keywords: Dam foundation; Grouting; Cement take; BPN
Abstract
Using cement grout to improve bedrock has been quite common. However, the cost for cement grout is the
most difficult one to estimate. This study adopted the Back-Propagation Neural network (BPN) to analyze the
grouting construction data of the Li-Yu-Tan dam, in order to estimate the cement take needed. The samples
analyzed included data from 3,532 grout sections. The data from the first half of the grouting construction were
used to derive the parameters of the predictive schemes, and then the second half of the grouting constructions
data were used to test the accuracy of those schemes. The accuracy level estimated by BPN on gross cement
take was 75.3%. It was higher than the original design level of 43.4%.
1. Introduction
The bedrock inherently has discontinuities such as
faults, folds, beddings, joints, and fractures, which
are the major factors that affect the engineering
properties of rock foundations such as permeability,
shear strength, and deformation. When a dam is
located on bedrock that has unknown discontinuities,
the underlying foundation needs to be improved to
raise its engineering properties and ensure a
watertight reservoir. Using cement grout to improve
bedrock has been quite common, and there are
numerous examples of its application in foundation
improvement [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]. However, since the
dam foundation is below the surface of the ground,
the cost for cement grout is the most difficult one to
estimate. The cost of cement grout mainly includes
the operational part and the material part. The cost of
materials is calculated based on the cement take.
Then the cost of the grouting operation is determined
based on the materials cost. Therefore, it is
necessary to study various methods to estimate the
cement take of the grouting based on actual
construction data. The methods commonly used are
mean method and linear regression method [7, 8].
In general, the status of the discontinuities in the
dam foundation is indirectly expressed by the
Lugeon value determined from the Lugeon
tests. This information can also be used to design the
water to cement ratio and the injection pressure used
in the grouting process. Eq. (1) is the definition of the
Lugeon value .
Lugeon value = Lu =
VPs
(l / m / min) (1)
TPi L
~5 cm [10].
riverbed, the left upper zone, the left lower zone, the
right upper zone and the right lower zone, as shown
in Fig.2 and Fig. 3, according to the tunnel locations
for the grout-curtain construction. However, because
the riverbed has been dug to the level of fresh
bedrock with a permeability lower than 10 Lugeon
, there are only a few in-place grout holes. Thus, the
analytical extent of this research covers only the left
upper zone, the left lower zone, the right upper zone,
and the right lower zone. The shaded part in Fig. 3 is
the outcome of the grout-curtain in the Li-Yu-Tan
dams foundation. For the shallower parts, grouting
can be performed from the top, but, in the deeper
areas, the grouting will have to be performed from
tunnels.
2.3 Depth of grout section
In a rock layers deeper into the underground, the
cracks are narrow and comparatively do not take in
grout because of the greater tectonic stresses in lower
elevation. When the tectonic stress is taken into
consideration, the depth of the grout section is
considered as one of the factors that affect cement
take. As to the grout-curtain construction in the LiYu-Tan dam, the diameter of the grout holes was 3.8
cm and the greatest vertical depth of a grout hole
was limited to 50 m . Inside of each grout hole, there
were several grout sections, and the grout process
was conducted from the bottom to the top of the
grout hole. If the depth of the grout section was
smaller than 30 m , the grout section length was 5
m . When the depth of a grout section was greater
than 30 m , the section length was 10 m .
2.4 Injection pressure
The injection pressure is the major technical factor
affecting cement take. Theoretically, the injection
pressure should be smaller than the tectonic stress
corresponding to the depth of a grout section, which
is obtained from the hydraulic fracturing test.
Moreover, the injection pressure should be smaller
than the tensile strength of the rocks [11, 12]. In
Taiwan, dam engineers consider that the injection
pressure is determined based on the principle of
additional pressure increasing about 30 kPa per
meter depth. The injection pressure adopted for the
grout-curtain construction of the Li-Yu-Tan dam was
150 kPa to 1200 kPa from top to the bottom of
the grout hole [13].
2.5 Lugeon value
The Lugeon value is the only physical
parameter that the researcher could obtain to evaluate
the multiple factors that affect cement take. This
value shows the degree of permeability in the dam
foundation. Basically, in grout improvement, a dam
Lugeon value
3. Data analysis
In the Li-Yu-Tan dams grout-curtain construction,
the grout holes were of the split-spacing type. Splitspacing means that the grout holes were arranged in
the sequence of primary holes, secondary holes,
tertiary holes, and quaternary holes. Supplementary
holes may be added to enhance the locations with
more discontinuities in the bedrock or near the holes
that required more cement take. Basically, the
arrangement of grout holes was based on the quality
of bedrock. The grout holes were arranged at
intervals of 1 m to 3 m . When the grouting process
of a specific hole lasts for 60 minutes, but the amount
of cement take does not reach 70 l , the grouting for
this section should be stopped. Finally, the drill
inspection holes used for performing the Lugeon test
to check the permeability of the dam foundation were
improved. The process of grouting in each grout
section was arranged in the following sequence:
drilling, washing, water testing, and grouting. During
water testing, the Lugeon tests need to be performed
to obtain Lugeon value .
Table 1 lists the data analyzed for 469 grout holes
and 3,532 grout sections. Each grout section had data
such as zone, sequence, hole depth, length of grout
section, rock nature, Lugeon value , injection
pressure, and cement take. All of the data were
collected from the inspection chart of the groutcurtain construction for the Li-Yu-Tan dam in 1993.
Then, all the data were entered into an Excel
application program for calculations before the BPN
analysis began.
For the convenience of analysis, this study has
adopted the symbol Lu to represent the Lugeon
value of a specific grout section. In addition,
because the lengths of the grout sections analyzed
were not the same (between 5 m and 10 m ), the
cement take of a grout section was divided by its
length to obtain the cement take per unit length Lg
( kgf / m ). There were three reasons to use cement
take instead of cement mortar take to define Lg .
First, the voids in the cracks were filled by solid
cement. Secondly, the major material expense in
grout construction is the quantity of cement. Thirdly,
many documents related to grouting refer to cement
take in place of cement mortar take [14, 15].
4. BPN method
The BPN is a branch of artificial neural networks
(ANN). The growing interest in ANN among
researchers is due to its excellent performance in
learning ability, fault tolerance, pattern recognition,
and the modeling of nonlinear relationships
especially involving a multitude of non-digital
h.
In the input layer and the hidden layer, use the
learning rate , h and X to calculate the
d.
The BPN software used in this research was PCNeuron, written in C language [23]. With the
assistance of the original programmer, a new
subprogram was written to return to the target output
value from the original domain [0, 1]. Then, this
value was converted to a data file that Excel software
can treat.
4.2
SSE
(T
p
p
j
Y jp ) 2
(2)
M N
p
Where T j is the actual output value of processing
p
element j in example p, Y j is the target output
13.
References
14.
1.
15.
16.
17.
18.
19.
20.
21.
22.
23.
Table 1 Number of grout holes and grout sections at each zone of the grout-curtain
Zone
Sequence
Primary
Secondary
Left upper zone Tertiary
Quaternary
Supplementary
Inspection
Primary
Secondary
Left lower zone Tertiary
Quaternary
Supplementary
Inspection
Primary
Secondary
Right upper
Tertiary
zone
Quaternary
Supplementary
Inspection
Primary
Secondary
Right lower
Tertiary
zone
Quaternary
Supplementary
Inspection
Sum
Number of grout
holes
11
9
20
36
11
14
15
15
30
51
3
14
16
15
30
52
28
20
9
9
17
26
4
14
469
Total length of
grout holes
591
543
1,158
1,869
540
739
828
826
1,655
2,326
166
772
976
987
1,949
3,029
1,422
1,193
480
472
906
879
221
749
25,276
Number of grout
sections
83
76
163
262
76
104
108
108
216
303
22
101
133
134
265
412
194
162
79
78
150
145
37
124
3,532
201~400
21~40
401~600
41~60
601~800
61~80
801~1,000
1,001~1,200
5
6
81~100
Table 3 Amount of gross cement take at each zone for the second half of the grout-curtain construction.
Item
Left upper
zone
Left lower
zone
Right upper
zone
Right lower
zone
Sum for
four zones
2,721
3,287
4,778
1,854
12,638
296,126
228,512
670,533
262,223
1,457,393
136,050
164,350
238,900
92,700
631,900
231,570
186,007
482,034
198,156
1,097,767
(3)
(%)
( 2)
45.9
71.9
35.6
35.3
43.4
( 4)
(%)
( 2)
78.2
81.4
71.9
75.6
75.3
Zone
Estimated
Accuracy
levels
Fig. 1. Longitudinal section of the Li-Yu-Tan dam indicating the rock layers in dam
foundation (CS=clean sandstone, MS=mudstone, AL=alternation of sandstone
and shale).
Crest
Grouting tunnel
Dam
Grouting tunnel
Grouting hole
Fig. 3. Longitudinal section of the Li-Yu-Tan dam indicating the extent of the grout-curtain.
Input layer
Hidden layer
Output layer
net
c
h3
_
X
1
W
13
13
h3
h3
3
W
W
14
h3
14
23
23
35
net
35
3
45
W
X
W
W
24
45
24
net
c
h4
h4
h4
h4
y5
y5
y5
y5
Input layer
Region
Kind of rock
Injection pressure
Lu
Hidden layer
Ouput layer
10
Lg
node 0
weight
0.34
0.18
0.23
-0.22
-0.17
node 1
weight
0.59
-0.81
-1.24
2.01
2.32
node 2
weight
0.92
0.50
-0.71
-1.24
0.63
Node3
weight
-0.52
-1.09
-0.14
0.45
-0.16
node 4
weight
1.57
1.74
1.48
1.74
1.36
node 10
weight
-0.79
-0.63
-0.35
-0.36
-0.36
biases
0.95
0.04
0.79
0.84
0.36
0.50