A diversion dam is a dam that diverts all or a portion of the flow of a river from its natural course. Diversion dams do not generally impound water in a reservoir; instead, the water is diverted into an artificial water course or canal, which may be used for irrigation or return to the river after passing through hydroelectric generators, flow into a different river or be itself dammed forming an onground or groundwater reservoir or a storm drain.
An early diversion dam is the Ancient Egyptian Sadd el-Kafara Dam at Wadi Al-Garawi, which was located about twenty five kilometres south of Cairo. Built around 2600 BC for flood control, the structure was 102 metres long at its base and 87 metres wide. It was destroyed by a flood while it was still under construction.
Diversion dams are one of three classifications of dams which include: storage dams, detention dams, and diversion dams. Storage dams are used to store water for extended lengths of time. The stored water then can be used for irrigation, livestock, municipal water supply, recreation, and hydroelectric power generation. Detention dams are built to catch surface runoff to prevent floods and trap sediment by regulating the flow rate of the runoff into channels downstream. Diversion dams are used to raise the water level in order to redirect the water to the designated location. The diverted water can be used for supplying irrigation systems or reservoirs.
Diversion dams are installed to raise the water level of a body of water to allow the water to be redirected. The redirected water can be used to supply irrigation systems, reservoirs, or hydroelectric power generation facilities. The water diverted by the diversion dam to the reservoirs can be used for industrial applications or for municipal water supply.
The design a diversion dam will fall into one of four basic types: embankment style dams, buttress style dams, arch style dams, and gravity style dams.
Embankment dam
Embankment style diversion dams are constructed to counteract the force of the water pushing on the dam by building a dam with enough weight to withstand the force.
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A flood is an overflow of water (or rarely other fluids) that submerges land that is usually dry. In the sense of "flowing water", the word may also be applied to the inflow of the tide. Floods are an area of study of the discipline hydrology and are of significant concern in agriculture, civil engineering and public health. Human changes to the environment often increase the intensity and frequency of flooding, for example land use changes such as deforestation and removal of wetlands, changes in waterway course or flood controls such as with levees, and larger environmental issues such as climate change and sea level rise.
Canals or artificial waterways are waterways or engineered channels built for drainage management (e.g. flood control and irrigation) or for conveyancing water transport vehicles (e.g. water taxi). They carry free, calm surface flow under atmospheric pressure, and can be thought of as artificial rivers. In most cases, a canal has a series of dams and locks that create reservoirs of low speed current flow. These reservoirs are referred to as slack water levels, often just called levels.
Dams are paramount for human development around the world. The course is an introduction to the fascinating domain of dam engineering, from design to construction, for water storage and regulated supp
Les aménagements hydrauliques sont indispensable pour garantir l'approvisionnement en énergie écophile et renouvelable, de même que l'approvisionnement en eau de bonne qualité et en quantité suffisant
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Heightening very high gravity dams is one of the solutions considered as part of the energy transition and to mitigate the effects of climate change. The paper presents a stepwise approach to assess the potential for dam heightening and its impact on the h ...
Springer, Cham2021
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Only 42 % of the mean annual production of large hydropower plants in the Swiss Alps is stored in their reservoirs. Once the reservoirs are full at the end of the summer semester, plants are operated as run-on-the-river in order to avoid spilling. A signif ...
Dams store water and trap sediment in their reservoirs. Downstream river segments, hence, are affected by a limited sediment dynamics. This becomes obvious by river bed incision, limited geomorphological variability and depletion of hydraulic habitats for ...