A review of modem turbine control systems for hydropower plants with high pressure tunnels

The goal of this paper is to present modern methods for mathematical modeling and development of stabilizing systems for high head Hydroelectric power plants with long and complex high pressure tunnel systems or traditional tunnels and penstocks . The first part of the paper gives a very brief presentation of the Structure Matrix Method which is the basic tool for stability analysis in the frequency domain. The analysis includes a frictional damping term of the pressure oscillations as function of the frequency and the flow amplitudes. The influence of the turbine characteristics is also included. ( Ref. 1 .) The second part of the paper includes a review of different so called water column compensating systems compared with a recently developed direct pressure feedback system. For complex conduit systems the damping effect obtained by throttling of special selected shafts in the system has been proven to be a powerful tool and such system is also presented.