Modeling Hydro Power Plants and Tuning Hydro Governors as an Educational Guideline

Appropriate modeling of components and related controllers are very significant in studying dynamic performance of power systems. In this paper, an educational procedure for modeling, simulation, and governor tuning of hydro power plants is presented. Different existing dynamic models of hydro plant components are reviewed. The procedure for calculating the required parameters from real plant data is also presented. Application and performance of reviewed models is discussed as well. In addition, appropriate methods for tuning different types of hydro governors are studied and a classical method is used for PID governors. Inclusion of the nonlinearity and elasticity of the detailed turbine-penstock model, and studying the effect of the servo transfer functions are the main aspects of the proposed tuning method. The paper is written in a way to be useful for an electrical engineering student or a novice engineer to model, simulate, and analyze a hydro power plant dynamic behavior, and finally tune its governor. This work can be used as a primitive guideline for educational and practical purposes. Copyright © 2012 Praise Worthy Prize S.r.l. All rights reserved.