ABSTRACT

The city of Florence (Italy) is historically threatened by many disastrous floods of the Arno River. Notwithstanding the construction of several structural measures in the last 50 years, the hydraulic risk for population and artistic heritage is still high. To further reduce the probability of inundation, a project of superelevation of Levane Dam, built in 1956 on the Arno River 50 km upstream Florence, has been carried out. An undistorted 1/60 scale physical model is used to investigate the efficiency of the spillway and the behavior of the existing stilling basins under the design condition. Due to the increased hydraulic head, discharge capacity of the spillway and the pattern of the hydraulic jump occurring downstream need to be analyzed. The experiments are aimed to investigate the reliability of the physical model and to test the dynamic of hydraulic jump and the spillway efficiency.