Describing fish passage in a river confluence with telemetry and CFD

The confluence between hydropower tailrace and the old river bed in Stornorrfors in the river Umeälven in the northern part of Sweden has shown to be the largest obstacle for upstream migrating salmon and sea trout during the migrating season. Fish are attracted to the high flow rate from the tailrace and will not migrate upstream in the old river bed being the passage to the fishway leading past the hydropower dam. By triangulating the movements of radio tagged fish using eight antennas in the confluence, it is here possible to describe the individual fish tracks left by radio tagged fish during the migrating season. These tracks are then compared with three-dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations of the confluence. By simulating the most common combinations of turbine flow and spill flow in the old river bed it is then possible to find correlations between individual fish movements and flow parameters such as velocity, turbulence intensity or vorticity for different flow combinations. It was previously assumed that fish had trouble locating the old river bed, the results of the triangulation however shows that most fish finds the old river bed within a few days but does not chose to migrate until several days (or weeks) later. The main issue to be solved is therefore not how to attract the fish to the old river bed but rather how to create favorable conditions in the old river bed so that migrating fish are more inclined to take that path upstream.<p>Godkänd; 2016; 20160418 (gunhel)