Modelling of Hydropower Plant

From leveraging big data to integrating smart solutions into a power plant it is a primitive requirement that a good, practical, and tangible model of the system exists to virtually integrate and simulate a given solution. MATLAB being a multifaceted software now-a-days, has different frameworks and libraries for implementing modern technologies like Artificial Intelligence but, also being a very old tool for power system analysis it gives engineers dexterity to integrate modern multidisciplinary solutions, swiftly and prudentially, in a single package. It expedites prototyping and also reduces cost. In the view aforementioned, we briefly reviewed and investigated, in this paper, some extant models in MATLAB/SIMULINK packages required for design and simulation of a Hydropower plant. At first, we introduced hydropower plants and various basic components required for its modelling. Then we went on to review the models underneath the hydraulic and the governor system (HTG), the excitation system and electromechanical dampening systems (power swing stabilizer) in the software. Then we investigated the powerplant model using different configurations of the excitation system, built with different electromechanical dampening (power swing stabilizer) systems available in MATLAB/SIMULINK. The resilience of the system is tested by introducing a three phase-ground fault at a certain time of its operation and also by tweaking the X/R ratio of the terminal source. Review and evaluation are made by analysing rotor speed characteristics, field(excitation) voltage characteristics and generated terminal voltage of synchronous machine under three different configurations.