## 3 Case Study  
### General Description of the Project  
A water conservancy project is located in the upper reaches of the Yellow River in China, and the project's primary structure is a concrete-face rockfill dam (CFRD). The dam maximum height (crest altitude-foundation altitude) is 132.20 m; the length and width of dam crest are 429.00 m and 10 m, respectively. The crest altitude is 2010.00 m, the altitudes of normal storage level and the design flood level are 2005.00 m, and the altitudes of calibration flood level and dead water level are 2008.28 m and 1975 m, respectively. The total storage capacity of the reservoir is 620 million cubic meters, with an average annual power generation of 5.14 billion kilowatt hours. The project layout is shown in Figure 2. The dam body is equipped with various monitoring programs such as displacement monitoring, seepage pressure monitoring, stress monitoring, etc. The location of the project and the dam surface displacement monitoring points are arranged as shown in Figure 3.  
To verify the advancement and reasonableness of the index determination method, the displacement monitoring index is established by taking the horizontal displacement of measuring point B3, which is located at the top of the dam and close to the largest cross-section, as an example for analysis. The elevation of measuring point B3 is 2010.00 m, and the pile number is 0 + 130.00 m. The monitoring data pertaining to horizontal displacement at the designated measuring point were collected between August 2009 and December 2014, amounting to a total of 1760 sets. The hydrograph depicting the measured horizontal displacement of the measuring point, along with the upstream water level and ambient air  
Figure 2: Layout of engineering buildings. the calculations due to the reliability of the bedrock at the dam foundation. CAE software is used for the finite-element mesh generation of the dam. The mesh size generally does not exceed 8% of the maximum dam height, according to references [40; 41; 43; 44], and mesh refinement should be applied to some fine structures to ensure the mesh independence and analysis efficiency of the model calculation results. The finite element model comprises 10,378 nodes and 10,966 hexahedral eight-node isoparametric units. X is in the horizontal direction (positive towards downstream), Y is in the vertical direction (positive towards upstream), and Z is in the transverse direction (positive towards the right bank). To more realistically represent the actual construction and operation of the project, the normal storage level is utilized as an analytical condition and staged filling of the dam and staged water storage are simulated during calculation. Three-directional fixed constraints are implemented at the base of the dam, surface forces are applied to the upstream panel surface in order to simulate upstream reservoir pressure, and mass forces are applied to all elements of the model to simulate gravity. The dam body is segmented into material zones in accordance with the characteristics of the actual project, and the sequence from upstream to downstream comprises the following elements: concrete-face slab (toe slab), extrusion wall, cushion, transition, upstream rockfill, main rockfill, and downstream rockfill, as illustrated in Figure 6.  
In analyses using SFEM, the constitutive model of each material in the dam is selected as follows: (1) The face slab, extrusion wall, toe slab, and other concrete materials are simulated via a linear elasticity model. (2) The rockfill zone and cushion, transition, and other geotechnical materials are simulated using the Duncan E-B model. (3) The simulation of the concrete joints was undertaken by way of the connection element. The interface between concrete and geotechnical materials was modeled using the Goodman element.