Water Power
Hydropower continues to serve as an important source of renewable energy. SAFL has a long legacy of hydropower research, with SAFL's original director, Lorenz Straub, serving to test and inform the design of hydroelectric projects around the globe. Today, SAFL hydropower research looks to not only inform more environmentally friendly hydropower practices, including both traditional dam designs and the testing and incorporation of hydrokinetic turbines, but also has worked on assessing the impacts of dam removal projects.
Affiliated Faculty
Roger Arndt
Michele Guala
John Gulliver
Lian Shen
SAFL Researchers
Matthew Lueker
Jeffrey Marr
Read about SAFL research projects with this topic (filter "Hydropower Projects" if needed):
Harnessing clean energy from rivers through hydrokinetic turbine arrays
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Hydrokinetic turbines are an emerging hydropower technology that take advantage of moving water currents to generate power.
SAFL team designs flume to support juvenile fish studies
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The United States Geological Survey (USGS) tasked SAFL researchers with the design of a race-track style flume, with the geometry and hydraulic conditions for early life stages of pallid sturgeon, an ancient but endangered fish species which historically inhabited the Missouri and lower Mississippi rivers
Channel belt evolution in braided rivers
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Channel belts are wide corridors created by the movement of a river over time, as shown by geologic indicators such as abandoned channels and eroded valley margins. The purpose of this study was to evaluate how channel migration causes individual braided channel belts to grow using SAFL's main channel.