Intake design is a major contributor to the performance and efficiency of a pumping system, and is particularly important for large pumps (the finished water pumps are 2500 horsepower each!).
The design team performed two types of hydraulic modeling as part of the intake design: computational fluid dynamic (CFD) modeling and physical modeling. CFD modeling simulates hydraulics using specialized computer software and is used to verify flow conditioning strategies before physical modeling. Physical modeling includes building a model of the pumping system at a reduced scale (~1/6 of actual size) to further verify the intake design.