Deformation prediction model for concrete dams considering the effect of solar radiation

Abstract

Due to the rarefied atmosphere and shallow cloud layers, high-altitude regions receive greater solar radiation than lower-altitude regions. This intense solar radiation affects the durability and temperature field of concrete dams, thereby influencing the deformation behavior. A deformation prediction model for concrete dams is developed that considers the impact of solar radiation in this study. Initially, the Bayesian online changepoint detection algorithm, coupled with the density-based spatial clustering of applications with noise algorithm, is employed to analyze the solar radiation data for two concrete dams located at the same latitude but differing in altitude, to assess potential disparities. Subsequently, based on the principles of heat transfer and the absorption efficiency of solar radiation, the impact of solar radiation is quantified, thereby refining the input factors of the proposed model. Finally, by incorporating the Multi-Head Self-Attention mechanism into the Long Short-Term Memory model, deformation data prediction is achieved, and the attention weights are output to deeply analyze the impact of different input factors on the deformation magnitude. An engineering case study serves to validate the practical applicability of the proposed model. The case analysis results highlight significant differences in solar radiation data between high-altitude and low-altitude regions and show that accounting for the impact of solar radiation can effectively enhance the performance of the prediction model.