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The Barriga Dam (Burgos, Spain) is a unique case study because its trapezoid spillway is located on the dam body and is composed of wedge-shaped concrete blocks (WSB) that include certain relevant improvements. This note summarizes the main features of the studies, the key aspects of the final design of the WSB and their placement on the dam, and important details of the spillway design. The design team concluded the study by showing the suitability of this enhanced technology for application to small dams and ponds in the short term, even with unit flows above 5 m2/s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main cause of rockfill and embankment dam failures is overtopping due to insufficient outlet works. During the last 15 years, the Civil Engineering Department: Hydraulics and Energy of the Technical University of Madrid has been studying the overtopping failure process of rockfill dams. One of the aims of this research is to develop design criteria of cost-effective rockfill dam protections to avoid failure due to such overtopping. Among the different types of known protection, this analysis has focused on downstream rockfill toes. The objective of this study is to achieve stability of the downstream shell of rockfill dams to prevent mass slides. This article summarizes the results of the preliminary experimental and numerical tests developed during the year 2008. Preliminary conclusions show the feasibility of this protection to mitigate partially or totally the serious consequences of overtopping in rockfill dams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During recent years, risk analysis has been introduced into infrastructure engineering, and has greatly improved the design, construction, and operation. In this paper, we study the risk of dams in the perspective of clustering analysis. Fuzzy c-means clustering (FCM) is widely used in many fields since it is simple and fast. However the result of FCM technique is sensitive to the initialization of clustering centres and is easily trapped into local optima. To improve the performance of FCM, an artificial bee colony algorithm (ABC) with FCM is proposed. By introducing ABC, the shortcomings of the original FCM method is overcome. The proposed clustering algorithm is demonstrated on a benchmark classification problem and two dam risk analysis problems. Results show that it is more accurate and robust than FCM, and it is an efficient tool for risk analysis of dams. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]