Author(s)

Zhongwei Liu, Jinsheng Jia, Cuiying Zheng, Chun Zhao, Zixuan Qiu, Xiaole Liu and Aili Li

Corresponding Author

Zhongwei Liu

ABSTRACT

There are about 200 thousand cubic meters of silt in the tail water section of the first grade hydropower station of Zhentou Dam-I in The Dadu River. A large amount of the silt raises the downstream water level, which seriously influences the tail water form, flood discharge capacity and power generation efficiency of the power station. So there is an urgent demand for silting. There are great technical difficulties in clearing up the silt because of the large proportion of large size pebbles in the silt, the high flow velocity of the river channel and the large variation range of water level in the tail water section, which belongs to the non-navigable area. Thus, the traditional methods like the dredgers are hard to apply. Moreover, the similar engineering cases have not been found in China. Through the productive test, this paper explores the effect of pneumatic silting on the dredging of the mountain areas with large amount of pebbles in The Dadu River, and studies the control index of the output power of the pneumatic silting machine and the production effect of the pneumatic silting system under the different water depth. It provides a new idea for solving the above problems and provides efficient and economical measures for similar projects. The results show that the pneumatic silting machine can achieve efficient silting under this condition. The main factors affecting the effect of silting are water depth, gas supply pressure and gas supply, among which the depth of water has the greatest impact on the efficiency of silting, which indicates that deep water conditions are more conducive to the use of pneumatic silting technology.

KEYWORDS

Pneumatic, high flow rate, large particle size, pebble, dredging