The temporal analysis of area capacity curve of Hirakud reservoir

Abstract

Humans has found various ways to use water and construction of dam and reservoir for the storage being one of them. Water is stored to be used for purpose of drinking, irrigation, power generation, etc. The reservoir sedimentation plays a vital role in the determining the storage capacity in any reservoir thereby directly influencing the water available for irrigation, power generation. The rate of sedimentation of any reservoir or dam is defined by silt index. One of the most important physical characteristics of dams and their reservoirs are area-capacity curves. Area-capacity curves are important for defining the storage capacity of the reservoir, thereby can be used in reservoir operation, reservoir flood routing, determination of capacity and water spread corresponding to each elevation This study deals with analyzing the area capacity curve using ILWIS 3.3 software to find the area and cone formula to find the corresponding capacity or volume. Then thorough analysis of reduction in capacity from the time of construction to year 2012. It also deals with changes in water spread area for different reservoir for different year and the results obtained are compared for different years and RLs to the original data at the time when it was first functioned. The interest for studying Hirakud dam comes from it being the longest man-made dam in the world which extends 16 miles (26 Km) in length which was constructed in between 1948-1957 with estimated cost of 1.01 billion.