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Barekyan, A. S., B. S. Malevanchik and M. A. Skorobogatov (1988). Promising designs of fishways. Hydrotechnical Construction. 22:384-388.

The designing of fishways is based on the location of the fishway in the system of hydrologic development and optimization of the hydraulic regimes in various zones: in the fishway, in the fish attraction zone in the lower pool of the hydrologic development, in the fish release zone in the upper pool, etc. The effectiveness of a fishway largely depends on its design and on the technological scheme of passage of the fish to spawning grounds. To eliminate negative aspects of the operation of existing fishways, research and development studies were carried out to develop new promising designs and technological schemes of attracting, holding, and conveying spawners from the lower to the upper pool of a hydrologic development. The realization of these designs will make it possible to increase the number of fishes being passed to spawning grounds, to reduce injury during their conveyance from the lower to the upper pool, and to reduce the number of downstream migrants that pass into the upper pool. The main group of developments is aimed at increasing the duration of active attraction of fishes, i.e., attraction at speeds close to the optimal, by changing the technology of releasing fish into the upper pool. One of the possible ways of increasing the productivity of a fishway is to continuously attract fish with a constant current speed at the exit of the fish-holding chute. Also effective is to replace the exiting stimulating devices with netting requiring a reduction of the current speed in the fish-holding chutes during its movement by devices using an electrical field for fish stimulation. Use of these fishway designs will make it possible to increase the passage of spawners to spawning grounds and thereby to increase the number of valuable commercial fish species in inland water bodies.