Control of Water Content and Retention in Hydropower Plant Cascades

Abstract: The discharge through a river hydropower plant must be controlled such that the water level at a pre-specified point close to the facility is kept within given bounds. The controllers used today have a somewhat demanding tuning and often create too much amplified, unnatural discharge variations resulting in unsatisfactory control performance.This will affect both surrounding nature and imposing problems for river navigation. This thesis will present a new type of controller called Override Selector feedback Control that adds an estimator for the water levels and water flows in the up- and downriver for each hydropower plant on top of the old controller. The objective of the state feedback control is to keep the total variation of the water levels and the waterflows as small as possible. After the linear, discrete time model of the power plant cascade in a river derived from the Saint Venant equations have been developed, the new concept is evaluated. Both the water level sloshing and the amplification of the discharges compared to the structure used today is damped with the new control structure. Other advantages of the proposed controller is that it will be cost efficient to implement because of the add-on approach. This is seen as a very important factor while the actual benefit that can be made by improving the water level control is very limited and thereby also the will to make extensive control investments. The control structure will be easily implemented as the estimators only need the same input data as used today.