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| Image courtesy the ESB |
Even with the large discharges from the golden Falls dam, the level in the lake has risen a metre in the last two days. This would be due to significant discharges from the Poulaphouca dam. I'm not sure what the max allowed level is for the lake. I'll see if I can find out. Both the Golden Falls and Poulaphouca lakes act as buffers to smooth out flow. In fact they're analogous to three types of systems, both mechanical and electrical: an air compressor tank, a flywheel on a machine such as an engine or punching machine and the filter capacitors in a DC power supply. In signal theory, all these systems act as low pass filters, storing energy and smoothing out "bumps", converting pulses into smooth ripples—ideally small ripples. If the ripples are too big in an electrical power supply, you get mains hum, which you may have heard in a bad PA system. Back to the lakes, they act as buffers. Once they fill, they no longer smooth out the bumps and the full flow of the River Liffey upstream of Poulaphouca feeds through the system.
Image courtesy ESB.
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