Improved prediction of pump turbine dynamic behavior using a thoma number dependent hill chart and site measurements

Abstract

Water hammer phenomena are important issues for the design and the operation of hydro power plants. Especially, if several reversible pump-turbines are coupled hydraulically there may be strong unit interactions. The precise prediction of all relevant transients is challenging. Regarding a recent pump-storage project, dynamic measurements motivate an improved turbine modeling approach making use of a Thoma number dependency. The proposed method is validated for several transient scenarios and turns out to improve correlation between measurement and simulation results significantly. Starting from simple scenarios, this allows better prediction of more complex transients. By applying a fully automated simulation procedure broad operating ranges of the highly nonlinear system can be covered providing a consistent insight into the plant dynamics. This finally allows the optimization of the closing strategy and hence the overall power plant performance.