A flow control structure is a device that alters the flow of water in a stream, drainage channel or pipe. As a group these are passive structures since they operate without intervention under different amounts of water flow and their impact changes based on the quantity of water available. This includes weirs, flow splitters and proprietary-design devices that are used for stormwater management and in combined sewers.
Flow-control structures are known to have existed for thousands of years. Some built by the Chinese have been in continuous use for over 2,000 years. The Chinese used these structures to divert water to irrigate fields and to actually deposit silt in specific areas so that the channels were not blocked by silt build-up. Structures like this required yearly maintenance to remove the accumulated silt.
More modern structures add to these basic principles. In Hawaii, there are numerous flow-control structures that have been built to irrigate the pineapple and sugar cane fields. The purpose of these structures is to divert water into the various canals and to keep them full. When over full, they dump excess water back into either streams or other canals. Among the simplest is a low dam across a shallow stream, forcing all of the water to one side to allow it to be easily collected in a canal. This can keep a canal full even with very low flows in a stream.
Another simple device is a series of concrete piers installed in a spillway to slow down the descending water so that it does not cause damage at the bottom of the spillway.
Famous quotes containing the words flow, control and/or structure:
“I candidly confess that I have ever looked on Cuba as the most interesting addition which could ever be made to our system of States. The control which, with Florida, this island would give us over the Gulf of Mexico, and the countries and isthmus bordering on it, as well as all those whose waters flow into it, would fill up the measure of our political well-being.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)
“Our intellect is not the most subtle, the most powerful, the most appropriate, instrument for revealing the truth. It is life that, little by little, example by example, permits us to see that what is most important to our heart, or to our mind, is learned not by reasoning but through other agencies. Then it is that the intellect, observing their superiority, abdicates its control to them upon reasoned grounds and agrees to become their collaborator and lackey.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“The verbal poetical texture of Shakespeare is the greatest the world has known, and is immensely superior to the structure of his plays as plays. With Shakespeare it is the metaphor that is the thing, not the play.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)