Optimal Design and Operation of Fuse-Gates Considering Water Loss Due to Gates Tilting

Installation of fuse-gates on free spillways might be a safe and reasonably simple solution to increase reservoir capacity compared with the expensive alternative of dam heightening. This research aims at optimum design of fusegates considering the flood routing process in the reservoir. Owing to the fairly complicated performance of fusegates in flooding condition, its optimum tilting control is a challenging task. The overall expected cost which includes expected cost of water loss and gates replacement as well as the initial gates installation cost is considered as the objective function of the optimization problem. Moreover, an efficient mixed Genetic Algorithm model is utilized to minimize the overall cost. Type of gates, their height and first tilting head are explicitly treated as decision variables. A case example is used to assess the applicability of the proposed optimization scheme. The results indicate that consideration of flood routing could have a significant effect on the optimum design of gates.