Detailed Modeling of a Practical 1400MW Hydropower Plant and Real-Time Hardware Emulation for Governor Tuning Application

This paper presents the detailed nonlinear mathematical model of a 1400MW hydro power plant (HPP) and it's faster than real-time dynamic emulation on hardware architecture of the field programmable gate arrays (FPGA). This model is used to study the interactive effect of hydro turbine governor system (HTGS) and power system stabilizer (PSS) in nonlinear hydro-mechanical and electrical coupled (HMEC) system during low frequency oscillations. The Hopf bifurcation technique is employed for oscillation stability study and to obtain the optimum and stable operating region of the PID controller in the governor. Furthermore, oscillation damping is enhanced by improved tuning of PSS considering governor's servo motor time delay and frequency dead-band. The methodology for improved HTGS and PSS tuning provides 10 sec faster frequency stability with higher positive oscillation damping. Improved stability is illustrated using frequency deviation and generator active power results. The model accuracy is validated using 1400MW HPP field data. HMEC dynamic model of HPP is implemented on reconfigurable parallel hardware architecture of the FPGA board Xilinx Virtex UltraScale+^TM, having the system solution pipelined for parallel computation, thus obtaining 49 times faster than real-time solution. This FPGA emulated prototype provides an advanced testing environment for new control strategies, system security assessment, predictive analyses of faults using real-time data, and plant optimization.