Hoover Dam

Summary

Hoover Dam is a concrete arch-gravity dam in the Black Canyon of the Colorado River, on the border between the U.S. states of Nevada and Arizona. It was constructed between 1931 and 1936 during the Great Depression and was dedicated on September 30, 1935, by President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Its construction was the result of a massive effort involving thousands of workers, and cost over 100 lives. It was referred to as the Hoover Dam after President Herbert Hoover in bills passed by Congress during its construction; it was named the Boulder Dam by the Roosevelt administration. The Hoover Dam name was restored by Congress in 1947. Since about 1900, the Black Canyon and nearby Boulder Canyon had been investigated for their potential to support a dam that would control floods, provide irrigation water and produce hydroelectric power. In 1928, Congress authorized the project. The winning bid to build the dam was submitted by a consortium named Six Companies, Inc., which began construction

Official source

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoover_Dam

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Optimized and adapted hydropower management considering glacier shrinkage scenarios in the Swiss Alps

Frédéric Jordan, Anton Schleiss, Stéphane Christian Olivier Terrier

Global warming is an alarming reality and likely leads to an increase of multiple pressures on socio-economic systems. However, in high-mountain regions it might also become an opportunity to adapt existing hydropower schemes and future projects to this new reality. In the Alps, the melting of glaciers first produces over the near future an increase of the average annual discharge depending on glacier and catchment characteristics, especially during the summer season. Nevertheless after a certain time, significant decrease of runoff related to glacier melting must be considered for hydropower management. Moreover, the melted glaciers free new alpine valley areas, which have a potential for the construction of new dams and reservoirs. The opportunity to build new dams and hydropower plants downstream of retreating glaciers is studied systematically in Switzerland within the framework of the National Research Program on Sustainable Water Management (NRP61) under the project “New lakes in deglaciating highmountain areas: climate-related development and challenges for sustainable use (NELAK)”. The developed methodology is based on several prediction models. Regional climate models provide spatially distributed rainfall and temperature scenarios for the next 50 years. The RS3.0 CLIMATE rainfall-runoff hydrological model computes the glacier evolution, the river discharge at the outlet of the catchment area as well as the hydropower production of the new lakes. Another model (GlabTop) is used to predict the future topography and geomorphology underneath the melting glaciers, in order to define the optimal locations of the future dams and reservoirs. As a case study the Corbassière glacier near the Mauvoisin reservoir in Valais is presented. The opportunity of the construction of a new dam and a hydropower plant is studied, as well as its economic benefit and its impacts on the environment. The result of the case study provides a basis to assess the potential of investing in such projects to ensure the Swiss hydroelectricity production also in future.

CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group2011

Flow conditions and sediment transport capacity in steep mountain rivers are poorly known. One of the main problems is that the presence of macro-roughness elements, such as large relatively immobile boulders, have a strong influence. Experiments carried out in a steep laboratory flume, show that the bed surface occupied by boulders and their protrusion need to be taken into account for the estimation of sediment transport. The tests were performed with a wide mobile grain size distribution and a random position of the large boulders. A clear relationship between the dimensionless distance of boulders and sediment transport capacity is found. The bedload rate can be reduced by 60% when 15% of the bed surface is occupied by boulders, compared to transport rate without boulders. The boulder diameter also has an influence on sediment transport capacity. This is linked to both the surface occupied by the boulders and its average protrusion

Taylor & Francis Group, CRC Press2012

Side-channels are a typical element of earth or rockfill dams to discharge floods sideways instead frontally, such as normally adopted for concrete dams. The side channel received attention from the hydraulics community from the 1920s, once the first large mentioned dams were erected, and its use culminated at Hoover Dam in the mid 1930s, based on a large test program. This paper highlights the major advancement of this basic element of hydraulic structures up to the late 1950s,both describing key installations over the world, and the actors who have furnished the governing design equations for water flow with spatially-increasing discharge. Short summaries on the biographical background are also provided, along with a discussion of the main literature that allowed for the current knowledge in this fascinating field of open channel flow.

2011

Optimized and adapted hydropower management considering glacier shrinkage scenarios in the Swiss Alps

Frédéric Jordan, Anton Schleiss, Stéphane Christian Olivier Terrier

CRC Press, Taylor & Francis Group2011