Analysis of Hydro-Coupled Power Plants and Design of Robust Control to Damp Oscillatory Modes

This paper presents an investigation of hydro power plants with pelton-type turbine-generator sets that are coupled hydraulically and electrically. In particular, the dynamic behavior and speed performance of this type of power plants at black-start is analyzed using singular value decomposition (SVD) and relative gain array (RGA). Following, robust control theory is used to design a hydro-stabilizer that improves the performance of coupled turbines while accounting for typical uncertainties in actuators.