Goulburn-Murray Water

Dartmouth Dam project

Goulburn-Murray Water (GMW) is Australia’s largest rural water corporation managing around 70% of Victoria’s stored water supplies and Australia’s largest irrigation delivery network.

Dartmouth Dam is operated by Goulburn-Murray Water. It is the largest capacity dam in Victoria and the highest structure of its kind in Australia. When full, the dam stores almost 4,000,000 megalitres.

Primary purpose of Dartmouth Dam is the storage of water for irrigation and domestic and stock use in Victoria and New South Wales.

GMW manages both regulated and unregulated river systems that flow into the Murray and administers groundwater within this area.

Why compressed air?

As GMW continue to provide release water from Dartmouth Dam to the River system, when the Low-Level Outlet is in use compressed air is injected into the outflow water to reduce cavitation of critical valving and pipeline infrastructure. GMW were using a four-wheel 6-ton compressor package for this purpose.

The Air Powered solution:

To replace the four-wheel, 6-ton compressor GMW were using, Air Powered proposed the KAESER M250 compressor package. The M250 towable diesel compressor provides the required volume of 900 cfm and is compact in design. The two-wheel towable unit and is a road registered package, and one of a very limited number of models manufactured worldwide where you can have such a large volume output compressor in a towable two-wheel trailer package.

The benefit of the new KAESER two-wheel package is it allows the compressor to be easily moved across the site. With the added bonus of this mobility, the towable diesel compressor can also be used to operate a range of air tools employed in the dam’s remedial works when not being used for outflow control.

Pictured above are the Dartmouth project team lead by Peter Liepkalns taking handover of the new package.

“We have recently commissioned the compressor while releasing from the Low-Level outlet. The Compressor, located at the tunnel portal, approximately 500 metres from actual Regulating Gates, did provide the required forced air volumes and pressures at the gate lips. The compressor’s innovative features combined with the usual Air Powered maintenance agreement make an attractive package, from both an economic and environmental perspective” – Peter Liepkalns, Weir Keeper at Goulburn-Murray Water.