Abstract
In a pressurized water conveyance system, such as a hydropower system, during hydraulic transients, maximum and minimum pressures at various controlling sections are of prime concern for designing a safe and efficient surge tank. Similarly, quick damping of surge waves is also very helpful for the sound functioning of the hydro-mechanical system. Several parameters like diameter of the surge tank, diameter of the orifice, operating discharge, working head, etc., influence the maximum/minimum surge, damping of surge waves in the surge tank, and the difference of maximum pressure head at the bottom tunnel and maximum water level in the surge tank. These transient behaviors are highly conflicting in nature, especially for different diameters of orifices (DO) and diameters of surge tanks (DS). Hence, a proper optimization method is necessary to investigate the best values of DO and DS to enhance the safety and efficiency of the surge tank. In this paper, these variables are accurately determined through numerical analysis of the system by the Method of Characteristics (MOC). Furthermore, the influence on the transient behavior with changing DO and DS is investigated and finally, optimum values of DO and DS are determined using Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) to minimize the effects of hydraulic transients on the system without compromising the stability and efficiency of the surge tank. The obtained results show significant improvements over the contemporary methods of finding DO and DS for surge tank design.
Highlights
Hydraulic transients occur whenever there is a disturbance in the steady state condition of a system, causing variations in pressure and discharge in the system
The models provided complete head loss coefficients for water flowing into or out of the surge tank, which revealed the complete hydraulic transient processes during load rejection or load acceptance, and display great agreement with the results obtained by Method of Characteristics (MOC)
Surge tanks are very important structures for a pressurized water conveyance system, Surge tanks are very important structures for a pressurized water conveyance system, which whichSurge prevents the effects of hydraulic in the system
Summary
Hydraulic transients occur whenever there is a disturbance in the steady state condition of a system, causing variations in pressure and discharge in the system. The control of hydraulic transients in pressurized systems like water supply, wastewater, and hydropower systems, is a major concern for engineers regarding the safety and effective operation of the system throughout the life span of the project. Uncontrolled hydraulic transients in the system have led to several cases of accidents in hydropower stations in the past [1,2,3]. A number of methods and models have been developed for the analysis of hydraulic transients, like the graphical method, the algebraic method, the implicit method, the wave characteristic method, the Method of Characteristics (MOC), the Zielke model, the Brunone model, Surge2012, and much more commercial software [4,5,6,7,8,9]. Martin et al [11] performed 3-D and 1-D simulations for various unsteady friction formulations and discovered that the convolution-based unsteady friction models, which consider a set of previous time steps in simulation, perform better than the instantaneous
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