The filling water inside the cavity below an aerator occurs for the flow of low Froude number or the small bottom slope of a spillway. The aerator may cease to protect against cavitation damages, and may even act as a generator of cavitation if it is fully filled by water. The experiments were conducted to investigate the influences of the geometric parameters, and then the filling water on the air concentration. The results show that the filling water, or the net cavity length, is closely related to the plunging jet length for a given aerator, and the air concentration at some section is proportional to the ratio Ln/Lj at a fixed Lj for different geometric parameters of aerators. Secondly, at the same ratio of Ln / Lj, the aerator with a larger height or a larger angle of ramp, or a larger bottom slope, would have a larger plunging jet length, and then a larger net cavity length based on the ratio of Ln / Lj. As a result, the large space of cavity, or the high air concentration of the flow could be obtained although the filling water increases also based on the fact that Lf = Lj - Ln. It is the space of the cavity that is the dominant factor to affect the air concentration of the flow.
The energy dissipation of flood discharges has been one of important problems that affect directly the safety of hydropower projects. The energy dissipater with sudden reduction and sudden enlargement forms, used widely in large-scale projects has been a kind of effective structure for energy dissipation. The concept of critical thickness was defined, which is related to both the geometric parameters and the hydraulic parameters of the energy dissipater, and the factors affecting the critical thickness, were analzsed by means of dimensional analysis. The empirical expression about the critical thickness was obtained and could be used as the criterion to distinguish the flows through the energy dissipater, i.e., the plug flow and the orifice plate flow. The error analysis showed that the critical thickness calculated by the expression has the errors of smaller than 10% in the estimation of the flows for the energy dissipater mentioned above.
Aerators on discharge tunnel outlets may be regarded as an effective protection against cavitation erosion. The air entrainment of aerators is governed by a number of independent parameters, including the bottom slope of releasing free-surface flow tunnel downstream of service gate, the end top slope of pressure tunnel, the height of step, and the Froude number at take-off. During eight phases of experiments, the effects of above-mentioned parameters were observed on the cavity length downstream of the fully open operating service gate of a discharge tunnel. The results show that, the bottom slope of releasing free-surface flow tunnel has obvious effect on the cavity length as well as the Froude number at gate take-off. The effect of the step height variations on the cavity length could be considered for higher discharges and steeper tunnel top slope, particularly in higher discharges, resulting in shorter cavity length downstream of service gate.
Early in 1953 the experiments by Peterka proved that air entrainment has effects on decreasing cavitation damage. This technology has been widely used in the release works of high dams since the inception of air entrainment in the Grand Goulee Dam in 1960. Behavior, mechanism and application of air entrainment for cavitation damage control have been investigated for over half century. However, severe cavitation damage happened due to complex mechanism of air entrainment. The effects of air entrainment are related to many factors, including geometric parameters, hydraulic parameters and entrained air manners. In the present work an experimental set-up for air entrainment was specially designed, the behavior of reducing cavitation damage was experimentally investigated in the three aspects of entrained air pressure, air tube aera and air tube number. The results show that magnitude of reduction of cavitation damage is closely related to the entrained air tube number as well as entrained air pressure, air tube aera, and that the effect through three air tubes is larger than that through single air tube although the entrained air tubes have the same sum of tube aera, that is, 1 ＋ 1 ＋ 1 〉 3. Therefore, it is important to design an effective manner of air entrainment.
