Upon reading my feature package on repowering the Welland Canal, one reader asked me if the 24 million gallons of water flowing through a lock is captured to generate power each time a ship passes. It was a good question given that not to put it toward that use seems like a terrible waste of massive water movement.
I asked my hosts about this when I visisted the Welland Canal on Nov. 9 at lock 3, standing next to older weir along side the lock. At the time, water spilled over that weir, but no power was generated. It was drainage only. The Taintor valves that control the in- and outflow of that 24 millions gallons run free of power generation, probably because the 24 million gallons has to enter and exit in 7-10 minutes to quickly dispatch the vessels. Adding generators would presumably slow down the flow.
However, the canal’s U.S. and Canadian overseers signed an agreement last year to build three hydro plants that uses existing weirs to capture "run-of-the-river" water that spills over them. The weirs handle the overflow water that does not pass through the locks. Why didn’t I think of that — after 75 years of operation!? Each power station will produce 2 megawatts and in together promises to power 5,000 homes, so sayeth the canal’s overseers.
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Against a backdrop of mounting product complexity and a need to keep a lid on development costs, companies are recognizing a need to make simulation a more integral part of the design process. In response, vendors in the CAD world are building out CAE functionality as part of their CAD suites while simulation vendors are building tighter integrations to leading CAD tools. Keith Meintjes, Ph.D., Practice Manager, Simulation and Analysis at CIMdata, Inc., joins Design News CAD Editor Beth Stackpole in this radio program to explore the new face of integrated CAD and CAE, how companies are benefitting from this tighter partnership between platforms, and how integrating CAE earlier in the development cycle pays off in optimized product designs.
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