BACKGROUND Freshwater mussels remain among the most imperiled species in North America due primarily to habitat loss or degradation. Understanding how mussels respond to habitat changes can improve conservation efforts. Mussels deposit rings in their shell in which age and growth information can be read, and thus used to evaluate how mussels respond to changes in habitat. However, discrepancies...

Public participation is now part of many decision making processes for managing environmental and technical risks. This article describes a test of a strategy to improve the quality of public input by combining themes from risk communication with the prescriptive decision process of value-focused thinking. It was hypothesized that participating in a structured, value-focused risk communication ...

Transient events often account for most of the fatigue damage sustained by hydroelectric turbines during operation. Since one of these damageable events is load rejection, this paper presents a study of the dynamic response of two hydroelectric turbines during load rejection. The two turbines are similar in design and in overall measured behavior. However, we observed that the two turbine runne...

As demand for electricity increases, investments into new generation capacity from renewable and nonrenewable sources should include assessment of global (climate) change consequences not just of the operational phase of the power plants but construction effects as well. In this paper, the global warming effect (GWE) associated with construction and operation of comparable hydroelectric, wind, ...

Automatic water level control methods for open channels have difficulties to keep good performances for a large range of flow and significant unknown disturbances. A new concept called Model-Free Control is applied in this paper for hydroelectric run-of-the river power plants. To modulate power generation, a level trajectory is planned for cascaded power plants. Numerous dynamic simulations sho...

Among the major sources of energy supply systems, hydroelectric power plants are more common. Energy supply during peak hours and less environmental issues are some of the most important advantages of hydroelectric power plants. In this study, designing parameters to supply maximum amount of energy was determined by using the simulation-optimization perspective and combination of IWO-WEAP model...

Generating electricity using Renewable Energy Sources (RES) is taking over more and shares in the global market of energy production. This results from policy which closely related to reduction greenhouse gas emission environmental pollution as well reducing consumption fossil fuels. The constantly increasing number producers RES, such Hydroelectric Power Plants Small Plants, gives an impulse f...