Open Journal of Civil Engineering, 2016, 6, 75-83 Published Online March 2016 in SciRes. http://www.scirp.org/journal/ojce http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojce.2016.62007 How to cite this paper: Raja, M.A. and Maheshwari, B.K. (2016) Behaviour of Earth Dam under Seismic Load Considering Nonlinearity of the Soil. Open Journal of Civil Engineering, 6, 75-83. http://dx.doi.org/10.4236/ojce.2016.62007 Behaviour of Earth Dam under Seismic Load Considering Nonlinearity of the Soil Mohammad Asif Raja 1 , Bal Krishna Maheshwari 2 1 Galgotias University, Gautam Budh Nagar, India 2 Indian Institute of Technology, Roorkee, India Received 14 October 2015; accepted 5 March 2016; published 8 March 2016 Copyright © 2016 by authors and Scientific Research Publishing Inc. This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution International License (CC BY). http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ Abstract The stability and safety are very important issues for the dam structure which are built in seismic regions. The dam body consists of soil materials that behave nonlinearly modelled with finite elements. The numerical investigation employs a fully nonlinear finite element analysis consider- ing linear and elastic-plastic constitutive model to describe the material properties of the soil. In this paper, seismic analysis of an earthen dam is carried out using Geo-Studio software based on finite element method. Initially, the in-situ stress state analysis has been done before the earth- quake established, and then its results are used in the seismic analysis as a parent analysis. A complete parametric study is carried out to identify the effects of input motion characteristics, soil behaviour and strength of the shell and core materials on the dynamic response of earthen dams. The real earthquake record is used as input motions. The analysis gives the overall pattern of the dam behaviour in terms of contours of displacements and stresses. Keywords Earthen Dam, Nonlinearity, Seismic Response, Earthquake Loads, Elastic-Plastic Model 1. Introduction Earthen dams are very important structure and provide renewable energy and agriculture facility to the country. As the dams’ structure is very large and the dams store tremendous amount of water, with respect to environ- mental and economic considerations, their safe performance is very important. Stability and performance are always primary concerns for any structure such as the huge structure of dams and the failure of it which causes disaster and loss of human being and properties in results. Despite significant development in geotechnical en- gineering, earthquakes continue to cause failure of many dams and result in the destruction of life and the dam-