FEBRUARY 2021

FREE TRIAL AND WORKSHOPS ON HYDROPASSAGE TOOLS

Free 30-day trial licenses for HydroPASSAGE toolsets are now available to potential users who participate in a customized virtual workshop led by the project technical team. 

The licenses apply to HydroPASSAGE’s Biological Performance Assessment (BioPA) toolset and the Hydropower Biological Evaluation Toolset (HBET), which are designed to increase fish survival through turbines and other hydropower structures. The toolsets use biological design criteria from scientific, validated predictions of impacts to fish. This information enables hydropower operators and turbine designers to identify the risks and physical stressors that may affect fish and come up with alternatives to improve biological performance. 

BioPA informs the design and operation of hydropower turbines by relating computational fluid dynamic models of hydraulic conditions to known impacts to fish. HBET relates data collected by field-based sensors, including Sensor Fish, to biological response models for downstream fish passage at hydropower facilities.

The virtual workshops will provide both current and potential users with hands-on experience with the toolset(s) they are interested in and will be customized to fit the needs of the user. Workshops will be designed in a modular form, starting with how to use the toolsets and moving to more complex instructions for specific aspects of the application where the user would like more training. These modules will be created by the HydroPASSAGE technical team. 

The workshops have been developed and will be led by Rajesh Singh (BioPA), Jayson Martinez and Hongfei Hou (HBET), and Brett Pflugrath (biological response).

To inquire about the trial license and to sign up for a workshop, contact hydropassage@pnnl.gov.

MEET HBET DEVELOPER HONGFEI HOU

Hongfei Hou’s career is deeply rooted in software engineering and hydropower. 

It’s this background that led to his work with HydroPASSAGE since 2016 as the lead developer of HBET. 

HBET relies on software to relate data collected by field-based sensors (e.g., Sensor Fish, acoustic telemetry) to biological response models for downstream fish passage at hydropower facilities. Hou sees HBET as a valuable tool for the hydropower industry. 

“HBET can help hydropower owners and operators to design and operate hydropower systems that minimize ecological impacts and meet hydropower regulatory requirements in a cost-effective manner,” Hou said. “They can use HBET to design studies, analyze data, perform statistical analyses, and evaluate injuries due to rapid changes in decompression, strike, and collision.” 

Hou notes that HBET not only has science-based tools for evaluating biological response, but also has a framework to adapt other technologies. 

“HBET has already incorporated Sensor Fish and acoustic telemetry, and it could be used for live fish studies using computational fluid dynamics,” Hou said. “HBET can be conveniently configured to support different data sources, including local databases, centralized databases, and even cloud-based databases.” 

Hou is the first author on a journal article on HBET. Read it here.

The HydroPASSAGE project is a research and development collaboration between engineers and biologists from the U.S. Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest and Oak Ridge National Laboratories that is finding solutions to improve downstream fish passage conditions through turbines and other hydropower structures. Learn more at hydropassage.org.