Discussion of "Hydrodynamic Pressure on Gravity Dams with Different Heights and the Westergaard Correction Formula" by Mingming Wang, Jianyun Chen, Liang Wu, and Bingyue Song.

The mathematical formulation of the problem describing the interaction between a dam and the reservoir during earthquakes is complex, and the solution requires the implementation of sophisticated numerical tools. The discussers claim that the transient FE analysis of a dam-reservoir system may not lead to a unique solution depending on the time integration method and the user-defined solution parameters. Impact of Dam Shape In the original paper, the authors only used a single dam shape (including five different heights) with the downstream slope of approximately 0.75 and the chimney width equal to 10% of the dam height. In the original paper, the authors incorporated three additional factors into the approximate Westergaard formulation through a set of multipliers: (1) the dam height, (2) the concrete elasticity, and (3) the reservoir bottom wave absorption. [Extracted from the article]