Environmental Assessment of Different Flood-Discharge Layout Plans in Baihetan Hydro-Power Project

The optimized design and layout of diverse flood-discharge devices are of great importance for improving the security and reliability of the dams in hydro-power engineering and minimizing their impacts on the regional ecological environment in environmental engineering. In this paper, various kinds of surface and mid-level outlets configurations are compared under multiple operational conditions for the Baihetan hydro-power project. In addition, both the time-averaged and the instantaneous fluctuation impact-pressure distributions in the plunge pool under typical working conditions are measured and investigated in order to study the reasonability of different flood-discharge layout plans. Moreover, the complex hydrodynamic environment and the spatial evolution of time-averaged flow fields along the downstream river are surveyed and further analyzed. The results could serve as the foundation of selecting the optimal flood-discharge and energy-dissipation design, and, more generally, references for the regional ecological environment assessment for Jinsha River after the construction of Baihetan dam.