The prestressed concrete cylinder pipe (PCCP) suffers from cracks and degrades due to the prestress loss which is induced by wire breakage. Reinforcement with external prestressed strands is an option to return the deteriorating pipe’s ability to withstand internal pressures. This reinforcement contributes to actively compensating for the prestress loss caused by broken wires at an economic price. The crack propagation in the core is constrained by the strands. Moreover, the high tensile strength of strands does not decrease with an increase in the bending angle. It is also unnecessary to dewater the pipes during construction. To evaluate the reinforcement effect, a prototype test of a PCCP was performed in an assembled apparatus. The apparatus was mainly constituted by two PCCPs whose internal diameter is 2000 mm. The status of each component of the pipe was measured by resistance strain gauges in three sections along the axial direction at inverted (360°), crown (180°), and spring-line (90°, 270°) orientations. The maximum width of the cracks in the outer concrete core at spring-line reduced from 1.2 to 0.1 mm after strengthening. The cracks of the core concrete changed slightly when the internal water pressure increased to the design pressure of 0.9 MPa. The strengthened pipe was capable of sustaining the design internal water pressure and the water tightness property was in a good state. The strains of the steel strands were all below the tensile strain level. The reinforcement of the PCCP with external prestressed steel strands is able to meet the strengthen requirement of the test.

Prestressed concrete cylinder pipes (PCCPs) can suffer from prestress loss caused by wire-breakage, leading to a reduction in load-carrying capacity or a rupture accident. Reinforcement of PCCPs with external prestressed steel strands is an effective way to enhance a deteriorating pipe’s ability to withstand the design load. One of the principal advantages of this reinforcement is that there is no need to drain the pipeline. A theoretical derivation is performed, and this tentative design method could be used to determine the area of prestressed steel strands and the corresponding center spacing in terms of prestress loss. The prestress losses of strands are refined and the normal stress between the strands and the pipe wall are assumed to be distributed as a trigonometric function instead of uniformly. This derivation configures the prestress of steel strands to meet the requirements of ultimate limit states, serviceability limit states, and quasi-permanent limit states, considering the tensile strength of the concrete core and the mortar coating, respectively. This theory was applied to the reinforcement design of a PCCP with broken wires (with a diameter of 2000 mm), and a prototype test is carried out to verify the effect of the reinforcement. The load-carrying capacity of the deteriorating PCCPs after reinforcement reached that of the original design level. The research presented in this paper could provide technical recommendations for the application of the reinforcement of PCCPs with external prestressed steel strands.

Two years after the Zhanghewan Pumped-Storage Power Station was put into operation, more than 500 blisters appeared in the asphalt concrete facing of the upper reservoir, and nearly half of them ruptured at the surface. The blistering mechanism of the asphalt concrete facing was studied in this paper. Through on-site inspection and coring inspection, it was found that the blistering was caused by the vapor pressure formed by the water enclosed in the middle of the impervious layer during high temperatures. Numerical analysis showed that the temperature 5 cm below the surface could reach 50–60 °C. Through numerical analysis and model tests, the internal water at this temperature may form a vapor pressure of 20 kPa. Finally, the blister size of the asphalt concrete facing at this temperature and pressure was studied with a model test. The possible sources of moisture inside the impervious layer were also analyzed through a core test, which found that moisture was most likely to be introduced by water spraying during rolling.

The current methods for evaluating the contact condition between concrete and lining were the ground penetrating radar (GPR) and the coring method. The penetration of radar electromagnetic waves was greatly affected by steel reinforcement and water, which often made the detection results of GPR unsatisfactory. A spectral analysis of the surface wave (SASW) method was used to evaluate the concrete-bedrock interface condition for hydraulic tunnel linings in this paper, since the impact elastic wave is less affected by steel bars and water content. An SASW implementation program based on fast Fourier transformation (FFT) was developed to analyze data from numerical simulations and field tests. Various models were studied to investigate the feasibility of using numerical analysis. For the first time, the study was employed to find out the influences of different receiver spacings and impact duration on the efficiency of detecting the existence of a weak layer underneath the concrete using the SASW method. On this basis, in-situ tests were carried out to verify the applicability in the field and results were verified by coring. In the research, the following results were found: (1) The finite element analysis results of different uniform or layered models showed that the SASW method could accurately identify the interface contact condition between the concrete lining and bedrock, especially the existence of voids; (2) when the receiver spacing was 1.0–1.5 times the thickness of the target object to be inspected, the quality of the collected signal data was the best; (3) under a certain reasonable range, the impact duration had an insignificant effect on the phase spectra and dispersion curves of a concrete-weak layer model; (4) in-situ SASW inspection could accurately tell whether the voids exist at the concrete-bedrock interface; and (5) the data processing program of the SASW method based on the MATLAB platform was accurate, convenient, and worth promoting.

In this paper, we experiment on the hydraulic fracturing of asphalt concrete with a voids content higher than 3%, which has arisen from the possible local shear dilatancy of Quxue asphalt’s core wall of concrete core dam, the highest one of the sort constructed in the world. The model test has shown that under the sole water pressure 0.13 MPa—relevant to the pressure where the dilatancy could appear at core wall of Quxue dam—the asphalt concrete with a voids content of 3.5% underwent hydraulic fracturing. Furthermore, the asphalt concrete with a voids content of 3.0% was tested for nearly 500 h and no sign of hydraulic fracturing was found, which again confirmed the threshold requirement for a 3% voids content to the impervious asphalt concrete to the hydraulic fracture concern. According to the analysis of the test result, the theory of fracture mechanics could be applied to the hydraulic fracture of asphalt concrete with a voids content between 3.4~4.0%, which behaved during hydraulic fracturing like a quasi-brittle material, similar to concrete. Because the hydraulic fracturing could occur in the shear dilatant asphalt concrete, a proper mix proportion of asphalt concrete to a project with adverse stress state should be carefully designed to rule out the possibility of shear dilatancy.

Monitoring the degradation of the dynamic elastic modulus (E_d) of concrete is of great importance to track the durability deterioration for hydraulic concrete structures. For the aqueduct under investigation in this study, the dynamic elastic modulus of bent frames and moment frame supports (E_d-frame), the dynamic elastic modulus of arch trusses (E_d-arch) and the shear stiffnesses of the asphaltic bearings of U-shaped flumes (K_flume) are the main parameters to define the dynamic behavior of the structure, which have direct correlation with its vibrational characteristics and thus practicably can be estimated by a BP (back-propagation) neural network using modal frequencies as inputs. Since it is impossible to obtain sufficient experimental field data to train the network, a full-scale 3D FE model of the entire aqueduct is created, and modal analyses under different combinations of K_flume, E_d-arch and E_d-frame are conducted to generate the analytical dataset for the network. After the network’s architecture is refined by the cross-validation process and its modeling accuracy verified by the test procedure, the primary modal frequencies of the aqueduct obtained from in situ dynamic tests are put into the network to obtain the final approximations for K_flume, E_d-arch and E_d-frame, which sets an evaluation baseline of the general concrete E_d status for the aqueduct and indicates that the makeshift asphaltic bearings of U-shaped flumes basically can be treated as a three-directional hinge in the FE model. It is also found that more inputs of modal frequencies can improve the prediction accuracy of the BP neural network.