Experimental investigation of the optimization of stilling basin with shallowwater cushion used for low Froude number energy dissipation

Energy dissipations induced by the hydraulic jump and the trajectory jet are the most widely known as the two dissipation modes at the downstream of flood discharging structures, which are often considered quite different even contradictory. However, such two energy dissipators can be used jointly and harmonically. In this paper, a new type of stilling basin with a shallow-water cushion and a triangular bottom deflector is proposed based on two different scale physical model tests of the flood discharging tunnel No.2 of Luding hydropower project. The experimental results show that the flow regime of the hydraulic jump in the presented stilling basin with bottom deflector enjoys a good and stable performance within a large range of flow rates and the energy dissipation rate is considerably high as compared to the conventional stilling basin even at a low Froude number. The results also indicate that the stilling basin with triangular bottom deflector has a better performance in improving the potential cavitation erosion according to the analysis of the pressure and the cavitation number compared to the trapezoidal one. The proposed new type of shallow-cushion stilling basin with a shallow-water cushion can be applied in similar energy dissipation projects with low Froude number and large range of flow rates.

Hydraulics of crest spillway with large unit discharge and low Froude number

With respect to the crest spillway with large unit discharge and low Froude number, the hydraulics of the slit-type energy dissipater at the outlet should be noticed due to the complicated flow regimes. In the present paper, some issues about hydraulic characteristics were experimentally investigated by means of five slit-type outlets and four tetrahedrons, including the flow choking, impact to river banks and jet trajectory. The main findings are as follows. The critical Froude number for the flow choking decreases with increasing outlet width of the slit-type energy dissipater. If the flow Froude number is expressed by the parameters just before this energy dissipater, the tetrahedron placed inside the side wall of the outlet could efficiently avoid the flow impact to the river bank of same side, and compared with the jet trajectory of the slit-type energy dissipater, the outlet with tetrahedron has different trajectory trend, i.e., the distance of the jet trajectory decreases with the increase of the water head due to special form of the outlet tetrahedron.

Cavity filling water control below aerator devices

With the rapid development of high dam projects within China, the dragon-drop-tail spillway tunnel is introduced and widely used. In view of the high water head and the large flow velocity on the dragon-drop-tail section, aerator devices are usually placed for the cavitation damage control. For the device placed in its initial position, it is a serious concern to design a suitable flow regime of the cavity and to control the cavity filling water due to the large flow depth and the low Froude number through this aerator. In this study, the relationships between the geometries of the aerator device and the jet impact angle of the lower trajectory of the flow are theoretically analyzed with/without a local slope. Nine test cases with different geometries are designed, the effectiveness of the filling water control is experimentally investigated under different operation conditions, and two criteria of the local slope design are proposed. It is concluded that the cavity flow regime and the filling water can be improved if a small impact angle and some suitable geometries of the local slope are designed.