With the rapid development of high dam projects within China, the dragon-drop-tail spillway tunnel is introduced and widely used. In view of the high water head and the large flow velocity on the dragon-drop-tail section, aerator devices are usually placed for the cavitation damage control. For the device placed in its initial position, it is a serious concern to design a suitable flow regime of the cavity and to control the cavity filling water due to the large flow depth and the low Froude number through this aerator. In this study, the relationships between the geometries of the aerator device and the jet impact angle of the lower trajectory of the flow are theoretically analyzed with/without a local slope. Nine test cases with different geometries are designed, the effectiveness of the filling water control is experimentally investigated under different operation conditions, and two criteria of the local slope design are proposed. It is concluded that the cavity flow regime and the filling water can be improved if a small impact angle and some suitable geometries of the local slope are designed.
The free flow on the step surfaces has received much attention for its representative body type,flow structure,water-air two phase flow,cavitation,and many complex issues.The experiments about the time-averaged pressure and aeration concentration distribution on the step surface show that the vertical plane of steps will inevitably experience negative pressure,which must rely on adequate aeration concentration to avoid cavitation damage.However,the self-aerated flow at the head section has a relatively low aeration concentration,and the concentration of the entire steps decreases with the increasing of weir head,the minimum appears in the vicinity of the corner,and the location is close to the minimum pressure.Thus,it is necessary to set aerator in the upstream end of the step surfaces to avoid cavitation damage.
The location of the inception point of the air entrainment directly affects the energy dissipation ratio, the cavitation damage control, and the training wall height designs for a stepped spillway and a stilling basin. In this paper, the boundary layer theory of plates is used to predict the location of the inception point of the air entrainment over the stepped spillways by assuming the steps on the spillways as a kind of roughness. An empirical formula is presented based on the physical model experiments, with the maximum error less than 1% except at one point where the error is 1.6%, as compared to the experimental data. Meanwhile, it is shown that the location of the inception point of the air entrainment for the stepped spillway is much nearer to the top of the spillway than that for a smooth spillways, which explains why the high ratio of the energy dissipation is provided for the stepped spillway.
Cavitation bubbles behind a convex body were experimentally studied by a high speed camera and a hydrophone synchronously. The experiments were conducted in a circulating water tunnel with five various contraction ratios： β = 0.497, β= 0.6, β= 0.697, β= 0.751, and β= 0.799. The distributions of the cavitation bubble collapse positions behind the five different convex bodies were obtained by combining the images taken by the high speed camera. According to the collapse positions, it was found that no cavitation bubble was collapsed in the region near the wall until the ratio of the water head loss over the convex body height was larger than 20, which can be used to predict if the cavitation damage would occur in the tunnel with orifice energy dissipaters.
Experiments are carried out by using high-speed photography to investigate the interaction between the spark-generated cavitation bubble and the air bubble in its surrounding fluid. Three problems are discussed in detail： the impact of the air bubble upon the development of the cavitation bubble, the evolution of the air bubble under the influence of the cavitation bubble, and the change of the fluid pressure during the development of a micro jet of the cavitation bubble. Based on the experimental results, under the condition of no air bubble present, the lifetime of the cavitation bubble from expansion to contraction increases with the increase of the maximum radius. On the other hand, when there is an air bubble present, different sized cavitation bubbles have similarity with one another generally in terms of the lifetime from expansion to contraction, which does not depend on the maximum radius. Also, with the presence of an air bubble, the lifetime of the smaller cavitation bubble is extended while that of the bigger ones reduced. Furthermore, it is shown in the experiment that the low pressure formed in the opposite direction to the cavitation bubble micro jet makes the air bubble in the low pressure area being stretched into a steplike shape.
