Surge Mitigation for Pumped Storage Hydropower

Spectacular surge waves can occur in hydraulic underground structures such as surge tanks and tunnel systems in pumped storage plants. The flexible way of operating these types of plants may cause pressure surges to be transferred to free surface waves and vice versa. The mitigation of these surges is the topic of the research discussed in this article. We aim to optimize the safe and reliable operation of pumped storage plants under the most unfavorable load cases that may appear over their life. This article describes some innovative developments in this field. The first part focuses on hydraulic research on surge tanks and the second part highlights free-surface waves
in storage tunnel systems