Experimental investigation to study the hydraulic performance of pressure flushing in straight wall reservoirs

Abstract EN

Sedimentation in reservoirs is considered as a serious problem in dams.

pressure flushing is one of the most effective techniques for removing the deposited sediments from reservoirs as well as it has few local effects and used as a clearing process by removing sediments around the entrance of intakes.

few studies were carried out to cover the gap of studying the hydraulic performance of pressure flushing in straight wall reservoirs.

in this study, many laboratory experiments were carried out to find out the effects of many hydraulic and geometric parameters on pressure flushing such as discharge, size and type of sediments, lengths of internal offset, water heights and sediment depths above the bottom outlets.

the experimental results demonstrated that the flushed sediment volume increased with the increasing of each of: outlet discharge, sediment depth, and internal offset length of the outlet.

on the other hand, the research revealed that the optimal ratio of water to sediment depths that introduced maximum volumes of flushed sediments were found between 2.08 and 2.26.

Finally, SPSS21 program and ANN tool integrated with the MATLAB 2011 program were utilized to facilitate the calculations of the regression analysis and the dimensionless equations to be used in estimating the flushed sediment volume and the effective duration time.