Worldwide, fish populations suffer from disruptions of migration routes caused by the installation of hydropower plants (HPPs), weirs and other manmade obstacles. Despite many existing studies, knowledge on downstream fish migration technologies is limited with regard to fish species and hydraulic performanceparticularly for large HPPs. Therefore, VAW of ETH Zurich aims at finding applicable solutions for a range of downstream migrating fish species in the scope of the EU Horizon 2020 research

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... roject "Fishfriendly Innovative Technologies for hydropower" (FIThydro). The present article reports selected results from the laboratory investigation of fish guidance structures (FGS) with vertical bars. Novel curved bar shapes were developed, systematically studied and compared to conventional bar shapes with respect to resulting head losses and flow fields to reduce negative impacts of FGSs on hydropower production. The results demonstrate that the curved bars are advantageous over the rectangular bars used in FGSs because of significantly reduced head losses and improved hydraulic performance such as homogeneous turbine admission flow field. A previously developed head loss prediction formula was extended to account for the new bar shapes.