DYNAMIC TIDAL POWER DAM TAPS CAUSEWAY'S HYDRAULICS

摘要

Dynamic tidal power (DTP) taps tidal flows to generate electricity. "It's a completely new source of energy," says Rob Steijn, director of the River, Coast and Sea Dept. at Arcadis Nederland BV. "It uses the acceleration force that is inherent in tidal movement." When Steijn and Kees Hulsbergen, owner of consultant Hulsbergen Hydraulic Innovation & Design, were senior researchers at Netherlands-based Delft Hydraulics in 1996 and designing a causeway that ran from the Dutch coast out to sea, they discovered that, across the dam, the causeway-formed hydraulic head could be enough to generate hydroelectric power. They patented the DTP concept in 1997. Now, Arcadis is part of a Dutch-Chinese program to assess the feasibility of constructing the first DTP project on the Chinese coast, near Shantou, Guangdong. DTP involves building a dam-like structure perpendicular to the coast in a shallow sea to capture the energy of tidal flows that run parallel to the shore. The dam is made of 100-meter-long precast-caisson sections with embedded, bidirectional hydroturbines. As the flow encounters the dam, it creates differences in water levels on the opposite sides of the dam. The head of the dam drives the turbines to generate electricity.