More From Things You Didn't Know About. The delicious scourge of anyone with a peanut allergy, Five Guys Burgers and Fries hit the scene in 1986 as a Virginia-based family business and soon exploded into a serious national chain with more than 1000 locations.
A dam is a big wall to stop water getting through to certain places. It is also used to irrigate water, and some dams, to make hydroelectricity. Hydroelectricity is electricity that comes from water. It is a environment friendly way of getting energy or power. Dams are, of coarse, found mostly on rivers though always on water of some kind. Some are huge and some are smaller.
Dams block the flow of a river or stream and create a lake or reservoir behind them, which acts as a source of stored energy (a battery is another example of a reservoir of stored energy). The dam raises the surface water up to a great height, giving it potential energy, the potential to do work.Water flows from the reservoir and through a dam by way of a special intake gate called a penstock. It's kind of like one of those water tunnels you slide through at a water park in the summer. Water flow rate is in cubic meters per second (m 3 /s). 2  Acceleration due to gravity is 9.81 meters per second squared (m/s 2). 3  Height is in meters (m). 4  Coefficient of efficiency ranges from 0 to 1, with modern power plants having the highest efficiency.