Total Dissolved Gas Calculation with Cellular Automata in a Spillway

During voluntary and involuntary spill events, total dissolved gas (TDG) levels may increase, potentially causing gas bubble disease (GBD) in fish. At hydropower plants (HPPs), one approach to mitigate TDG supersaturation is the use of deflectors in spillway design. Ideally, deflector design integrates physical modeling with mathematical or computational approaches; however, such simulations typically require substantial computational resources. This study presents a cellular automata model to estimate TDG levels using hydrodynamic velocity fields simulated in OpenFOAM as input data. The main advantage of this approach is its low computational cost because it can be executed on a personal computer, making it suitable for preliminary studies. In contrast, the simulations conducted for the design of the Colíder HPP spillway deflector required high-performance computing resources, utilizing a cluster with 96 processors.