Taum saux dam - project

Taum sauk
Have you heard of the Taum Sauk Dam? It's located in the Saint Francois mountains, Missouri. It had a major mishap in December 2005.

This project is to explain the mishap and to design a solution to handle the issue of overflow.

We used legos to design this project.

Taum Sauk

Location: St. Francois mountain range, Missori

Built: 1960 - 1962

Purpose: Hydroelectric Power Plant

Details: 2 Reservoirs: Upper and Lower. The law of thermodynamics says the flow of water turns the turbine which operates the generator to produce electricity.

Research:

On December 14, 2005, the Taum Sauk Dam, a hydroelectric power plant located in the St. Francois mountain region, failed. It failed when overtopping [Go to British Dictionary definitions( if you don’t know where this is, go down until you see it)] caused the upper reservoir to collapse. How it functioned is it pumped water from the  This is a molecular model(It might have been an actual situation):

Functions:

-Hydroelectric power plant

- Upper reservoir :

Two inflows - Rainfall and water refill from lower reservoir

The water from dam and the pressure of water is used to turn hydro turbine and in turn operates the generator to produce electricity. Operates during daytime.

-Lower reservoir

The water body used to store water which was pumped to upper reservoir during nighttime  to operate hydropower plant during daytime.

System and Purpose:

Tags: Black river, Proffit mountains

Failure:

Many design/construction flaws, a programming error, and some human errors contributed to a on December 14, 2005.

Overtopping:

	Cause	Reason
System & Programming	-Program error -Sensors failure	-Program continued to pump water when reservoir was nearly full resulting in overtopping, and the wall was eroded. - sensors failed to indicate that the reservoir was full and did not shut down the facility's remaining pump unit until water ha
Design	Differential settlement(fines) b)Overtopping and Spillways c) water level instruments to prevent overpumping	a) b)There were no spillways designed for this dam (Inflow -rainfall -lower reservoir water pumped during night into upper reservoir)
Maintenance		-Overtime it is shown that parapet walls have decreased ~2feet
Safety and Security	-Stability - Spencer method and Bishop method though adequate after construction the time period needed an update and upgrade. -Sensors failure	-Lack of stability measures and counter design failure in rockfill resulted in concrete parapet wall toppling - safety factors dropped for both localized toe and global slope stability -sensors failed which resulted in lower reservoir filling up upper reservoir which was already full
Geology	-irregular foundation material -Erosion and materials used for rockfill near parapet wall	They picked the easiest materials to get and didn’t take into account that it was easily erodible -Understandably the cost of those of materials
Natural disaster and remedy measure	-Rainfall -Earthquake
Evacuation and Emergency procedures	Luckily no fatalities but 5 people were seriously injured

Solution:

	Cause	Reason
Multiple sensors	You wouldn’t have to worry about  your sensor(notice the no “s”)breaking
Spillway	Flood heads into spillway and does no damage	Nobody gets hurt. Nothing gets destroyed. Dam has 0% chance of failing.
Outlet/Spillway	Automated outlet with manual override to handle over spill	An automated outlet to drain the excess water through a safe pipe to less danger area or to water the nature needs to be built.
Lower reservoir refill(Drainage)	If there was a drainage pipe manually operated, you wouldn’t have to wouldn’t have to worry about broken sensors.	It would drain from the upper reservoir and to the lower reservoir. Plus, if there was a turbine and generator you could produce extra electricity!
Reservoir full	Never operate dam full of water	-There will probably be overfill if operated full of water. -compromise to settlement and natural erosion will have increased rate if the reservoir is full
Lower reservoir refill(Power)	The same hydro power is used to refill upper reservoir. Solar power	Wastes less electricity. Might produce extra

Krithik’s lego model of upper reservoir:

Spillway build / Outlet

 
The crank if we rotate should open the spillway and the water should flow through the pipe or outlet to less risky area.