Abstract: The flood discharge of high dam is accompanied by the transmission and release of energy. Up to now, examples of damage to discharge structures are still common. The flood discharge and energy dissipation of high dam is one of the key technologies for dam construction and operation. Eleven newly-built super-high arch dams with heights larger than 200 m in China since 2000 are taken as the main research objects. The layout of flood discharge and energy dissipation and hydraulic indexes of these super-high dams are among the top in the world. We systematically summarized their energy dissipation evaluation indexes, orifice shapes, flood discharge and energy dissipation layouts and hydraulic characteristics of plunge pool. On this basis, we further expounded three typical innovative modes of energy dissipation of dam body: Ertan mode with jets collided, Jinping mode with jets not collided, and Xulong mode with a combination of jets both collided and not collided. The research priority route and engineering application gradually changed from flood discharge and energy dissipation safety to the safety of flood discharge and the reduction of the atomization of bank slope, with the dynamic pressure in plunge pool smaller than 15×9.81 kPa(standard limit). The rapid development of super-high arch dam construction in the recent two decades has greatly promoted the technological progress and the innovation of flood discharge and energy dissipation mode in this field. We suggest further strengthen the research and development on numerical simulation of complex boundary and the research on the generation and release process of TDG for high dam flood discharge.

Key words: super-high arch dam, flood discharging energy dissipation, dynamic pressure in plunge pool, jets collision, jets non-collision, flood discharge atomization