Modelling and Controlling Hydropower Plants

This book shows how an understanding of system dynamics is crucial to good performance and how that performance can be improved across a plant's operating range by using predictive control. It explains how different controllers can be applied.

Hydroelectric power stations are a major source of electricity around the world; understanding their dynamics is crucial to achieving good performance. The electrical power generated is normally controlled by individual feedback loops on each unit. The reference input to the power loop is the grid frequency deviation from its set point, thus structuring an external frequency control loop. The book discusses practical and well-documented cases of modelling and controlling hydropower stations, focused on a pumped storage scheme based in Dinorwig, North Wales. These accounts are valuable to specialist control engineers who are working in this industry. In addition, the theoretical treatment of modern and classic controllers will be useful for graduate and final year undergraduate engineering students. This book reviews SISO and MIMO models, which cover the linear and nonlinear characteristics of pumped storage hydroelectric power stations. The most important dynamic features are discussed. The verification of these models by hardware in the loop simulation is described. To show how the performance of a pumped storage hydroelectric power station can be improved, classical and modern controllers are applied to simulated models of Dinorwig power plant, that include PID, Fuzzy approximation, Feed-Forward and Model Based Predictive Control with linear and hybrid prediction models.

Practical studies that show how different controllers can be applied to a hydroelectric power plant Complete linear and nonlinear models are described and used not only to simulate the power plant but also as a main part of predictive controllers A concise guide for researchers and experimental engineers working on pumped storage hydropower stations

Inhalt
Part I: Hydropower Plants.- Hydropower - a Historical Perspective.- Part II: Modelling the Power Plant.- Part III: Controlling the Power Plant.