Embankment, gravity, and arch dam types, spillway design and a worked overflow-capacity calculation, dam safety considerations, and the environmental and regulatory considerations that shape a real dam project.
Every dam resists the reservoir behind it in one of three fundamentally different ways — through the mass and internal friction of compacted fill, through the mass of a monolithic concrete structure, or by transmitting load horizontally into canyon abutments through arch action — and that structural choice is inseparable from the site itself. This module works through why embankment dams cannot tolerate overtopping the way concrete dams can, how a spillway is sized against a design flood with a fully worked ogee-crest calculation, and why internal erosion (piping) is the leading embankment-dam failure mode, using the 1976 Teton Dam failure as the standard reference case.
By the end of this module you should be able to explain why dam hazard classification is based on downstream consequence rather than dam size, and how fish passage, sediment transport, and NEPA/FERC requirements have shifted dam regulation toward treating environmental consequence as a first-order design concern.