Stochastic Finite Element Analysis Of The Characteristics Of Seepage Fields

Most seepage analysis is deterministic at present. However the permeability ateach location within the soil mass is itself a random variable and the permeability atlocations that are "close" together is spatially correlated. To take into account thespatial randomness discretization method of random fields is combined with finiteelement method, that is stochastic finite element method. The variance ofpermeability is so large that the variance of the potential, the gradient and the seepagequantities can not be ignored. .So it is important to analyze the seepage stochastically. In this paper a stochastic finite element program is coded applying perturbationmethod. The effect of stochastic soil permeability on seepage is studied. The results ofparametric studies to gauge the effect of the standard deviation and correlationstructure of the permeability on the output statistics relating to potential values,seepage quantities and gradients are presented. In all cases, comparison is made withresults that would be achieved on a deterministic basis. This study is very valuable forthe reliability analysis of seepage failure.