Gate Operations of Multi-Purpose Rengali Dam for Flood Management in Downstream Areas

Abstract

Problems and opportunities change over time. Just as the goals of managing and using water change over time, so do the processes of planning to meet these changing goals. Planning processes evolve not only to meet new demands, potential and objectives, but also in response to new insights of how to plan reservoir and gate operation more effectively.
Reservoir operation is a multifarious problem that involves many decision variables, multiple objectives as well as considerable risk and uncertainty (Oliveira
and Loucks, 1997). In addition, the incompatible objectives lead to significant challenges for operators when making operational decisions. Traditionally, reservoir operation is based on heuristic measures, embracing rule curves and prejudiced judgements by the operator. This provides general operation strategies for reservoir releases according to the current reservoir level, hydrological conditions, water demands and the time of the year.
Established rule curves, however, do not allow a fine-tuning (and hence optimization) of the operations in response to changes in the widespread conditions. Therefore, it would be
valuable to ascertain an analytic and more systematic approach to reservoir operation, based not only on traditional probabilistic/stochastic analysis, but also on the information and prediction of extreme hydrologic events and advanced computational technology in order to increase the reservoir's efficiency for balancing the demands from the different users.The main contribution of the thesis is the development of the MIKE 11 Structure Operation (SO) module is being set up to describe the present and future reservoir operation of the Rengali Dam in the Bramhani river basin. The SO module is applied whenever the flows through spillways and sluice gates are regulated by operation of movable gates or controlled directly as in turbines and pumps. The operation rules are applied via a number of logical statements combined with Control Strategies as per the existing operation rule curves.