Use of a dam’s restituted water discharge

The owner of a dam must ensure that a minimum residual discharge exists downstream so as to preserve aquatic fauna and flora. According to the size of the dam these discharges can be quite important, often more than a cubic meter per second.

It is therefore interesting not to just allow the water to escape through a valve, but to recover the potential energy of this water using a turbine located at the foot of the dam. In this particular case, the discharge remains constant, whereas the head varies according to the level at which the dam is filled. The diagonal turbines recently developed by Mhylab are particularly well suited to this situation, as the adjustable blades allow a very high efficiency to be guaranteed over a wide range of heads.