Abstract
Lake Kariba become was built in the late Fifties to supply water mainly for hydro-electricity production. The Dam wall, is an engineering construction, and it has its own sustainability issues such as consequences of alkaline amalgamation reaction, the steadiness of the spillway plunge pool and the overall dam structure getting old. The six sluice gates making up the spillway are ageing away too over the years because of a advancing alkali-silica reaction within the concrete. With the sluices not functioning properly, the reservoir cannot be maintained successfully to manage the flood regime of the Zambezi River. A number of tests have been carried out to ascertain the sustainability of the structure. Among the different sustainability tests done was the thermal stress analysis. The dam simulation was done using ABAQUS software with the dam split into a mesh. The concrete properties adopted were: E=35GPa, poison ration=0.2, and density=2400 kg/m3.