1Chairman, Board of Consultants for Ranjit Sagar Dam and Shahpurkandi Dam Projects, Water Resources Dept, Punjab, Chandigarh, India
Online Published on 28 February, 2022.
A simple and fool-proof innovative method is outlined for operation of spillway gates of multipurpose dam projects during floods. Use of this method can result in utilization of a substantial portion of flood waters for irrigation and power generation, which would otherwise go waste and create floods down-stream. The method is insensitive to errors in input data and is self-correcting. Its efficacy and benefits over the traditional gate operation method can be assessed by running it in a computer simulation, before implementing the same on any project.
Based on this method, a real-time computer program for Ranjit Sagar Dam reservoir, for the available inflow run-off data of 78 years was run, and it was found that a substantial portion of flood waters could be utilized for irrigation and power generation, and frequency and discharge of spillage could also be reduced substantially.
