Hi All,

Progress is coming along well with our senior design project of the variable flow inlet gate at Boonesboro State Park.

For those unaware, for a senior design project in Mechanical Engineering at UK, myself and 6 other seniors in ME are designing a variable flow gate for a hypothetical whitewater park at Fort Boonesboro. We are hoping also to get the ball rolling on the approval and funding process.

So we have tentatively set the dimensions for the channel, and we'd love some feedback from you all. The channel design is trapezoidal, with a bottom width of 10 feet, a top width of 26', a depth of 4' (water depth), 2 to 1 slope of the sides, which results in a flow of 708 cfs if concrete is used to make the channel.

Also we'd appreciate some feedback on the design of the gate. We have narrowed down the gate designs to 3 different types, you can see them on the attached PDF. Post on here any thoughts about pros and cons of each design, whatever you think they may be.

Our next steps are going to be doing pressure and stress analysis and CAD drawings of the chosen gate, then we will move to building a scale model of the park.

Thanks for your input everyone, if you have any questions about the gate or project in general, just let me know. Also, if you are interested in helping with the project, what we need the most right now is contacts with the Army Corps of Engineers, or anyone who might have a hand in the politics of the park. Thanks!!!

Robby

I think the Army Corps is out of the picture now. Its all the Kentucky River Aurthority. I don't have any contacts, though.

Robby, why don't you keep the opening rectangular and use a sluice gate. It can be contolled by one manual hand crank to modulate flow. Or contolled by an electric or hydraulic actuators. The main channel downstream can still be trapazoidal but your gate would be rectangular to minimize cost.

Looked at the PDF, not sure how this fits in the existing structures. Is this in the current lock? Never been there myself, but read that earlier engineering failures left this lock in the middle of the dam instead of near one of the banks. How do people get there to use it? How do they launch into this channel? Where do they go as they wash out, and how do they get back to the start? How many does it accomodate at a time? Per hour? What are the materials/labor involved in building this? What kind of maintenance is involved? At what river flow levels is it usable? How many days per year is that, on average, and at what times of year? What type of liabilty insurance is necessary.

The existing structures, turned out to be extremely expensive to maintain due to the very high flood waters and debris, that's why they concreted off the entrance to the locks - the doors kept failing and had to be replaced. Those are just questions I would have off the top of my head. I'm sure the KRA is concerned about maintaining water supply as their main concern. Shutting it down when water flow is too low, making absolutely sure there are no failures in high water - hard to beat what they have now, a big slab of concrete to block the lock.

When you do the stress analysis, I'd like to see it at flood conditions too. Looks like the highest level recorded was at 40.15 ft. and 101,000 cfs (contrasted with todays level of 10.5 ft and 1530 cfs).

Don, keep in mind that these guys aren't designing the whitewater park, except in as much as they need some understanding of what such a park would entail in order to design the gate. The original whitewater park design came from Dustin Anderson about five years ago and he would probably be the better one to address a lot of these questions.

Hanley

Hey all, thanks for the input so far!

We have a meeting with the Kentucky River Authority, so we should know alot more about the feasibility of the project as a whole after that.

Justin - good call on the rectangular gate. We had planned on having a rectangular opening in all scenario's except for the split sluice. We were concerned about a typical sluice gate because of the need for a large super-structure above the channel to raise and lower it. Aesthetically that isn't the most appealing option.

Don - The inlet to the park would be upstream of the current lock and dam that is there. We wouldn't be dealing with it at all. In the plans made by Leachman, there is a walkway from the beach (where the paddlers exit the course) back to a put in that would be well below the inlet gate. We hope to make the gate man-powered, so we can keep the cost down as well as not have to worry about electronics failing. We plan to analyze the stresses at flood stage, although, the entire park would sit on a flood plane, so the park would be closed at this point. We have not done an analysis on the amount of users able to be on the course at one time, however, we are taking into account all the USGS water data to determine how far down to make the channel to ensure that flow would be there for most of the year. Paddlers are going to want to use the park most during the dryer months, so thats what we're designing it for.

If you (or follow on projects) get to the point of looking at the users, and determine time between the features, time the average person stays at each feature (or blows by it if too crowded or out of space to queue up), and the max rate of users/hour before the whole thing breaks down - would be a nice subproject to set up a simulation using queing theory to see where bottlenecks develop when you start randomizing the start time of users, but keeping the users/hour constant, then what happens as you vary the rate to approach what you think you max is. Assign some kind of satisfaction rating to each run, based a lot on how long you stay in queues, how many features you have to blow by.

Oh yeah, the engineering disaster that caused the lock to be in the middle of the river, was that they didn't protect the flanks of the dam one year, and a flood scoured a new channel to one side of the lock. Don't want your water park to become the new channel of the Kentucky!

Hi All,
here is an update on a meeting I had with the Kentucky River Authority as well as our gate design decision. As always, if you have any questions, feel free to post em here or email me. Thanks!

Robby