Hydraulic ram pump is an automatic water-pumping equipment generally used to pump drinking and irrigation water in mountainous and rural areas having short of power. In the past, it has been analyzed and optimized by fabricating various prototypes and conducting experiments and comparisons. This process is time and labor consuming and detailed flow features cannot be determined except efficiency, discharge, and period. In this paper, a method for the optimal design and performance analysis of hydraulic ram pump system with numerical simulation and physical experiment is presented to shorten the number of prototypes and develop high-performance product. The proposed evaluation indexes include head loss coefficient, drag coefficient, eccentric distance of pressure, and velocity distribution uniformity. Two types of structures, named front-enlargement and back-enlargement, were initially designed. According to the numerical simulation, the latter one has lower head loss coefficient and drag coefficient, larger eccentric distance of pressure and higher velocity distribution uniformity and was adopted in the novel hydraulic ram pump. Then, the design theory and method on adjustable and high-head experimental platform have been developed, so that the delivery head can be easily controlled and regulated in laboratory. Experiments were carried out for the delivery heads of 2.0 m and 2.7 m and comparisons were conducted with other products. The results show that, when the delivery head is less than 50 m, the efficiency of the new product ranges from 50% to 70% while the delivery flow is the largest. Its application in Liangshui River, Beijing, indicates that the novel hydraulic ram pump is a practical tool in fountain sight and for irrigation purpose without external power input.

Complete pump characteristics (CPCs) are the key for establishing pump boundary conditions and simulating hydraulic transients. However, they are not normally available from manufacturers, making pump station design difficult to carry out. To solve this issue, a novel method considering the inherent operating characteristics of the centrifugal pump is therefore proposed to predict the CPCs. First, depending on the Euler equations and the velocity triangles at the pump impeller, a mathematical model describing the complete characteristics of a centrifugal pump is deduced. Then, based on multiple measured CPCs, the nonlinear functional relationship between the characteristic parameters of the characteristic operating points (COPs) and the specific speed is established. Finally, by combining the mathematical model with the nonlinear relationship, the CPCs for a given specific speed are successfully predicted. A case study shows that the predicted CPCs are basically consistent with the measured data, showing a high prediction accuracy. For a pump-failure water hammer, the simulated results using the predicted CPCs are close to that using the measured data with a small deviation. This method is easy to program and the prediction accuracy meets the requirements for hydraulic transient simulations, providing important data support for engineering design.

As the debates surrounding the negative influences of flood control using dams or reservoirs on the eco-environment become fierce, non-structural flood control measures like land use change gain more attention. This study researched the effect of integrated and single land use changes on three floods at small, medium and large scales, respectively, in Yongding River basin. A SWAT (Soil and Water Assessment Tool) model was used to simulate the effect of integrated and single land use changes on floods of different scales. The single land uses were set as S1, S2, S3 to represent the agricultural, grass and construction land changes. The results showed that: (1) the integrated land use changes reduced the small flood, the medium flood and the large flood by 14%, 13% and 5%; (2) the land use management functioned most effectively on medium-scale floods and least effectively on large-scale floods; (3) S1 decreased the medium floods optimally by 24% with a 7-day maximum runoff volume as the indicator and by 29% with a 1-day maximum flood discharge; (4) S2 reduced the medium floods optimally by 21% with runoff depth volume as the indicator; (5) S3 increased the medium floods optimally by 15% with a 1-day maximum flood discharge as the indicator.

Ice blasting with explosives is an important method for mitigating or preventing ice jam floods during the spring breakup of frozen rivers. Successful blasting relies on properly determining the relationships between parameters including blasting crater radius, explosive weight, ice cover thickness, and water depth, though variations in the final three factors have significant effects on the blasting crater radius. We conducted field experiments in an upper reach of the Heilong (Amur) River, which forms the border between China and Russia, in order to develop an empirical formula correlating these factors. The blasting crater radius determined by the proposed equation resulted in average errors of less than 8.5% when compared with the measured values. This formula was used for ice blasting along the upper Heilong River in spring 2016 and 2017, successfully preventing ice jam formation during river breakup and thus providing a scientific basis for the prevention of ice-related flooding in northern regions.

The hydraulic ram pump is water-powered machinery using low-head hydroenergy. An overall mathematical model is presented to consider the dynamic behavior of the waste and delivery valves. Model experiments, numerical simulations, and references analysis are combined to investigate the characteristics of pressure and water level fluctuations, the motion of the waste and delivery valves, as well as corresponding performance optimizations. The mathematical model can well represent the pressure and water level characteristics of the hydraulic ram pump, as well as the motion of the waste and delivery valves. The numerical results are in good agreement with the measured peak value, trough value, waveform, and period. The opening and closing of the waste valve are found to meet the power-function of time with the power exponents 1.5 and 0.2, respectively, while the delivery valve can experience multiple opening-closing processes for low lift cases. The partial water volume in the air chamber flows back into the pump body during the closure of the delivery valve, resulting in the degradation of the delivery flow. The delivery valve of perforated structure is a priority for the high lift case due to reducing backflow, while that of lift-check-valve structure is advised for other cases because of the small local head loss coefficient.

Hydraulic ram pump is an automatic water-lifting machinery, which converts the low-head potential energy of a large volume of water into a small high-head potential energy through the periodic open and close of waste valve and delivery valve. The pump would run inefficiently or even fail if the valves are poorly designed. In this paper, a novel and reliable waste valve of lift-check-valve structure has been developed. The sealing mode integrating soft and rigid sealing rings, the equation for the valve disc thickness and the equation for the flow passage in terms of the diffuser length, the larger radius and the smaller radius, are presented to guide future design. Major factors influencing the hydraulic performance, including the flow passage, valve opening and valve clack mass, are discussed with model experiments and numerical simulations. The optimized configuration for a 100-mm hydraulic ram pump includes a curved diffuser, 25–30-mm valve opening and 1.2-kg valve clack mass. The proposed waste valve can decrease the head loss coefficient of the system by 45%, achieve relatively higher working efficiency, and lift the largest water when the delivery head is lower than 30 m.