Minimum Reservoir Water Level in Hydropower Dams

Vortex formation over the intakes is an undesirable phenomenon within the water withdrawal process from a dam reservoir. Calculating the minimum operating water level in power intakes by empirical equations is not a safe way and sometimes contains some errors. Therefore, current method to calculate the critical submergence of a power intake is construction of a scaled physical model in parallel with numerical model. In this research some proposed empirical relations for prediction of submergence depth in power intakes were validated with experimental data of different physical and numerical models of power intakes. Results showed that, equations which involved the geometry of intake have better correspondence with the experimental and numerical data.