The dynamic response of concrete dams is severely affected by hydrodynamic pressures applied to its upstream face. Therefore, decreasing these pressures considerably affects the performance of such infrastructures. Several methods have been presented for this purpose, out of which air curtain isolation is considered in this paper. A program was developed to model the air curtain using an equivalent material located on the upstream face, and the Amir-Kabir arch dam in Iran was selected as the case study. In the conducted analyses, the material non-linearity of mass concrete was modelled using the smeared crack approach proposed by the first author and his co-workers, and the reservoir medium was assumed compressible. Based on the obtained results, hydrodynamic isolation can severely affect the dynamic responses of concrete arch dams. As a whole, it can be inferred from the presented case study that the air curtain considerably eliminates the dam-reservoir interaction, i.e. hydrodynamic pressure.
