75th Anniversary | Projects of a lifetime
Quentin Shaw, the Vice President of ICOLD in Africa, gives an insight into the highlights of his career in the dams industry to date
Wolwedans Dam, Southern Cape, South Africa
I STARTED MY CAREER in 1984, taking up employment at the Department of Water Affairs and Forestry (DWAF) in South Africa, having graduated from the University of Birmingham in the UK in 1983. The job situation for civil engineering graduates in the UK in 1983 was bleak and I thought that five years in South Africa would be very useful to allow me to get my professional registration under my belt. Working in the Structural Studies Division for the first 15 months and learning the in-house dams finite element analysis software, I was transferred to the Concrete Dams Division and was soon working on the design of a 70m high arch dam. As my supervisor was otherwise engaged with the early stages of the Lesotho Highlands Project, I was left to work directly with the Chief Specialist Engineer of Concrete Dams, Frank Hollingworth. I remember clearly iterating 19 arch configurations for Wolwedans Dam before establishing the optimal geometry, a process which taught me a lot about the optimal structural function of an arch dam.
As the design developed, the news from the
geotechnical investigations was not so good and it was apparent that the thin, double curvature arch that I had designed was not going to be compatible with the foundation rock mass. When circumstances pushed the design towards an arch-gravity configuration, Frank decided the site would be ideal for the world’s first roller-compacted-concrete (RCC) arch-gravity dam. With RCC known at the time in South Africa as Rollcrete, Frank was the country’s primary protagonist and would subsequently became known as Mr Rollcrete.
Changuinola 1 Dam, Panama
First Spilling at Changuinola 1 Dam, Panama
Consequently, I started work on the design of the dam and spent ten months preparing 200 design drawings before being transferred to site at the beginning of March 1987. I spent the next two years as the design representative, with additional responsibility for quality control and the RCC mix on site at Wolwedans Dam. My most interesting challenge on site was the design, manufacture, installation and testing of the system that allowed the induced contraction joints installed at 10m centres to be grouted, as a means to re-establish the structural continuity of the arch structure after the hydration heat had been dissipated. While I had left DWAF by the time that the induced joints were grouted at Wolwedans Dam in 1992, the design, construction and behaviour monitoring of the dam had left me with a feeling that the structural behaviour of the dam under the applicable thermal loading was not quite what might be expected on the basis of traditional concrete dam theory. This situation was definitively confirmed by the behaviour of the dam after grouting of the induced joints. After I finished a thesis-based Masters degree through the University of Brighton, I started my PhD
58 | May 2024 |
www.waterpowermagazine.com
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44 |
Page 45 |
Page 46 |
Page 47 |
Page 48 |
Page 49 |
Page 50 |
Page 51 |
Page 52 |
Page 53 |
Page 54 |
Page 55 |
Page 56 |
Page 57 |
Page 58 |
Page 59 |
Page 60 |
Page 61 |
Page 62 |
Page 63 |
Page 64 |
Page 65 |
Page 66 |
Page 67 |
Page 68 |
Page 69 |
Page 70 |
Page 71 |
Page 72 |
Page 73 |
Page 74 |
Page 75 |
Page 76 |
Page 77
