Exploration of Advanced Fabrication Techniques for Organic Shaped Energy Dissipators in Spillways

Abstract

This paper focuses on the advanced design and production of concrete energy dissipators which are used for aeration of water on spillways. Traditionally, the concrete energy dissipators assumed simple block shapes which were dictated by limited production capabilities, mainly by the planar formwork and issues related to demolding. The advent of new concrete mix design and flexible construction technologies, such as 3D printing and CNC machines, allowed to consider more optimized organic shapes for increasing the energy dissipation efficiency and reducing the volume of material in our case by 38%. Since the physical laboratory modeling is an integral part of hydraulic research, a prototyping method using small-scale models was developed for design, production, quality control and experimental assessment of concrete energy dissipators of complex shapes. This method helps to expedite the research process when newly designed or modified shapes can be readily produced and tested in the hydraulic test channel for its energy dissipation efficiency and erosion resistance. The digital production, as all geometric information is perfectly digitized, at the same time helps to define the numerical models of the spillways for advanced continuum fluid dynamics analyses.