Wear Reduction for Hydropower Turbines Considering Frequency Quality of Power Systems: A Study on Controller Filters

Nowadays, the wear and tear of hydropower turbines is increasing, due to more regulation movements caused by the increasing integration of intermittent renewable energy sources. In this paper, a controller filter is proposed as a solution to the tradeoff between reducing the wear of turbines and maintaining the regulation performance and thereby the frequency quality of the power systems. The widely used dead zone is compared with a floating dead zone and a linear filter, by time-domain simulation and frequency-domain analysis. Simulink models are built and compared with onsite measurement. Then, the time-domain simulation is used to investigate the guide vane movement, the load disturbance and the power system frequency, based on a one-day grid frequency data measured in this study. In the theoretical analysis, the describing functions method and the Nyquist criterion are adopted to examine the stability of the system with different filters. The results show that the floating dead zone, especially the one after the controller, has a better performance than the dead zone on both the wear reduction and frequency quality. The linear filter has a relatively weak impact on both guide vane movements and the frequency quality. Other related conclusion and understandings are also obtained.