Acta Scientiarum Polonorum

Abstract: Nowadays, when floods devastate also our country special attention is put on hydrotechnical structures. One of them is dam embankment of Nielisz reservoir, which one of major goals is to defend the upper Wieprz River basin from flood. This paper presents finite element analysis of dam embankment of Nielisz reservoir made with Plaxis using Modified Cam-Clay soil model for organic mud. Performed analysis allowed to define shape and size of displacement accumulation zones and rotations of principal stress directions which occurred in them. Use of devices which are capable to investigate anisotropy of soil mechanical properties is severely restricted, thus it is practically impossible to take into account this matter. Solution to this problem may be evaluation of proportions between values of shear strength parameters obtained from triaxial compression tests with standard stress path with values of this parameters obtained from tests in hollow cylinder apparatus with different stress paths, more adequate for in situ conditions.