History Of The Three Gorges Dam

No engineering project is quite like the Three Gorges Dam (TGD).

The TGD is located in the Hubei province in China, spanning across the Yangtze River. It is a hydroelectric dam, stated by Zhang Cheng to be currently boasting 32 turbines with a nominal capacity of 22,500 Megawatts, making it the “worlds largest base of clean energy”. The TGD is the largest hydroelectric dam in the world.

A dam along the Three Gorges had long been an idea for a way to tackle flooding along the Yangtze river and was an idea that had been initially proposed in 1919 by Dr. Sun Yat Sen to prevent flooding that would frequently devastate the prime arable farmlands and the construction of the TGD began on the 14th of December 1994 (“Three Gorges Project, n.d.). The TGD was built by The China Three Gorges Corporation, a state-owned electrical power company.

The entire dam is expected to be completed this year, but has been functional with all of its turbines since 2012, and working since 2008 (Ming, X. M., & Lin, Y., 2007). The project costed approximately $24 billion to construct but is suspected to have costed more (“Three Gorges Dam”, 2012). This dam is the origin to China’s current efforts in encouraging work to be done for renewable energy which accounts for a 15 percent share of the country's energy consumption already (Paris, 2013).

Basic Engineering Associated with The Three Gorges Dam

While the TGD has been largely criticised and still considered controversial one great thing that any large scale project does and it too had done, is create jobs. The TGD would therefore require specialists in several different disciplines of engineering including but not limited to chemical engineering and mechanical engineering.

Chemical engineering involv...

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... 1919, it becomes no surprise to find out that China has been doing research on sedimentation since the 1960’s (“Sedimentation Issues”, n.d.)

According to Jie Tang at the World Bank, China has much experience in sediment control from their other hydropower projects but that more research was required for the TGD. Jang further suggested that “extensive sedimentation modelling” would be required to support the design of the TGD. One model should be done by a reputable hydropower engineering university another model should be done at a science research institute with experience in hydropower.

The Three Gorges Corporation stated that they had conducted research that they had based on extensive modelling both mathematical (theoretical) and physical (empirical). The solution that they adopted involved a method of “storing clean water and emitting more-sediment water”