Advances in Spillway Hydraulics: From Theory to Practice

Abstract

Over the past decades, significant advances have been achieved in hydraulic structures for dams, namely in water release structures such as spillway weirs, chutes, and energy dissipators. This editorial presents a brief overview of the eleven papers in this Special Issue, Advances in Spillway Hydraulics: From Theory to Practice, and frames them in current research trends. This Special Issue explores the following topics: spillway inlet structures, spillway transport structures, and spillway outlet structures. For the first topic of spillway inlet structures, this collection includes one paper on the hydrodynamics and free-flow characteristics of piano key weirs with different plan shapes and another that presents a theoretical model for the flow at an ogee crest axis for a wide range of head ratios. Most of the contributions address the second topic of spillway transport structures as follows: a physical modeling of a beveled-face stepped chute; the description and recent developments of the generalized, energy-based, water surface profile calculation tool SpillwayPro; an application of the SPH method on non-aerated flow over smooth and stepped converging spillways; a physical model study of the effect of stepped chute slope reduction on the bottom-pressure development; an assessment of a spillway offset aerator with a comparison of the two-phase volume of fluid and complete two-phase Euler models included in the OpenFOAM® toolbox; an evaluation of the performance and design of a stepped spillway aerator based on a physical model study. For the third topic of spillway outlet structures, physical model studies are presented on air–water flow in rectangular free-falling jets, the performance of a plain stilling basin downstream of 30° and 50° inclined smooth and stepped chutes, and scour protection for piano key weirs with apron and cutoff wall. Finally, we include a brief discussion about some research challenges and practice-oriented questions.