Using hydropower turbine discharge as a complementary spillway

Abstract

Spillways are very important dam safety devices that can discharge large amounts of water to prevent over-topping a dam. However, spillways are expensive to build and have operational issues. This paper is a report from a test of a system capable of discharging the full turbine flow even in the absence of an external power grid absorbing the electrical power. Instead the power is dissipated in a local load. The scope of the tests is to verify the use of the discharge capacity of the turbine under continuous operation as spillway flow for emergency discharge from a Hydropower reservoir. A dumpload consisting of a hot water electrode boiler cooled by water taken from the turbine spiral case was used as a local load. The results show long-term stability of using a local load and turbine discharge as an electrical alternative to building additional traditional spillways to increase spillway capacity from a hydropower reservoir.