Predictive Maintenance of Critical Components in Hydroelectric Turbines: A Review

Hydropower is a cost-effective, reliable, and programmable renewable energy source. Many hydropower plants worldwide have been in operation for decades and now need maintenance and refurbishment. While failures in hydroelectric plants are uncommon, they can be catastrophic and lead to prolonged downtimes. Thus, robust monitoring strategies are essential to track failure modes in critical components, preventing breakdowns and productivity losses. However, very few attempts are made to consolidate the new knowledge developed in this area in a state-of-the-art review paper. Therefore, in this article, we discussed the state-of-the-art sensing technologies that can be used to monitor critical components in hydropower turbines, their common failure causes and effects, identifying intermittent failures using various sensing technologies, and sensor locations to monitor these critical parts. In this state-of-the-art review, we identified that blades, nozzles and needles, bearings, and shafts are some of the critical parts in turbine that require continuous monitoring. For these critical components, vibration-based monitoring can be used to monitor the wear due to erosion, cavitation, wear, misalignment, or looseness. The information presented in this state-of-the-art review will be beneficial to new researchers getting accustomed to hydropower condition monitoring (CM) and will assist the industry in developing new turbine CM strategies and technologies.