Abstract:Hydropower plays a key role in the actual energy market due to its fast response and regulation capacity. In that way, hydraulic turbines are increasingly demanded to work at off-design conditions, where complex flow patterns and cavitation appear, especially in Francis turbines. The draft tube cavitation surge is a hydraulic phenomenon that appears in Francis turbines below and above its Best Efficiency Point (BEP). It is a low frequency phenomenon consisting of a vortex rope in the runner outlet and draft tube, which can become unstable when its frequency coincides with a natural frequency of the hydraulic circuit. At this situation, the output power can significantly swing, endangering the electrical grid stability. This study is focused on the detection of these instabilities in Francis turbines and their relationship with the output power swings. To do so, extensive experimental tests for different operating conditions have been carried out in a large prototype Francis turbine (444 MW of rated power) within the frame of the European Project Hyperbole (FP7-ENERGY-2013-1). Several sensors have been installed in the hydraulic circuit (pressure sensors in the draft tube, spiral casing, and penstock), in the rotating and static structures (vibration sensors, proximity probes, and strain gauges in the runner and in the shaft), as well as in the electrical side (output power, intensity, and voltage). Moreover, a numerical Finite Element Method (FEM) has been also used to relate the hydraulic excitation with the output power swing.
To accurately determine the dynamic response of a structure is of relevant interest in many engineering applications. Particularly, it is of paramount importance to determine the Frequency Response Function (FRF) for structures subjected to dynamic loads in order to avoid resonance and fatigue problems that can drastically reduce their useful life. One challenging case is the experimental determination of the FRF of submerged and confined structures, such as hydraulic turbines, which are greatly affected by dynamic problems as reported in many cases in the past. The utilization of classical and calibrated exciters such as instrumented hammers or shakers to determine the FRF in such structures can be very complex due to the confinement of the structure and because their use can disturb the boundary conditions affecting the experimental results. For such cases, Piezoelectric Patches (PZTs), which are very light, thin and small, could be a very good option. Nevertheless, the main drawback of these exciters is that the calibration as dynamic force transducers (relationship voltage/force) has not been successfully obtained in the past. Therefore, in this paper, a method to accurately determine the FRF of submerged and confined structures by using PZTs is developed and validated. The method consists of experimentally determining some characteristic parameters that define the FRF, with an uncalibrated PZT exciting the structure. These parameters, which have been experimentally determined, are then introduced in a validated numerical model of the tested structure. In this way, the FRF of the structure can be estimated with good accuracy. With respect to previous studies, where only the natural frequencies and mode shapes were considered, this paper discuss and experimentally proves the best excitation characteristic to obtain also the damping ratios and proposes a procedure to fully determine the FRF. The method proposed here has been validated for the structure vibrating in air comparing the FRF experimentally obtained with a calibrated exciter (impact Hammer) and the FRF obtained with the described method. Finally, the same methodology has been applied for the structure submerged and close to a rigid wall, where it is extremely important to not modify the boundary conditions for an accurate determination of the FRF. As experimentally shown in this paper, in such cases, the use of PZTs combined with the proposed methodology gives much more accurate estimations of the FRF than other calibrated exciters typically used for the same purpose. Therefore, the validated methodology proposed in this paper can be used to obtain the FRF of a generic submerged and confined structure, without a previous calibration of the PZT.
Nowadays, hydropower plays an essential role in the energy market. Due to their fast response and regulation capacity, hydraulic turbines operate at off-design conditions with a high number of starts and stops. In this situation, dynamic loads and stresses over the structure are high, registering some failures over time, especially in the runner. Therefore, it is important to know the dynamic response of the runner while in operation, i.e., the natural frequencies, damping and mode shapes, in order to avoid resonance and fatigue problems. Detecting the natural frequencies of hydraulic turbine runners while in operation is challenging, because they are inaccessible structures strongly affected by their confinement in water. Strain gauges are used to measure the stresses of hydraulic turbine runners in operation during commissioning. However, in this paper, the feasibility of using them to detect the natural frequencies of hydraulic turbines runners while in operation is studied. For this purpose, a large Francis turbine runner (444 MW) was instrumented with several strain gauges at different positions. First, a complete experimental strain modal testing (SMT) of the runner in air was performed using the strain gauges and accelerometers. Then, the natural frequencies of the runner were estimated during operation by means of analyzing accurately transient events or rough operating conditions.
The ability of hydropower to adapt the electricity generation to the demand is necessary to integrate wind and solar energy into the electrical grid. Nowadays hydropower turbines are required to work under harsher operating conditions and an advanced condition monitoring to detect damage is crucial. In this paper the methodology to improve the condition monitoring of Pelton turbines is presented. First, the field data obtained from the vibration monitoring of 28 different Pelton turbines over 25 years has been studied. The main types of damage found were due to fatigue, cavitation and silt erosion. By analyzing the vibration signatures before and after maintenance tasks, the symptoms of damage detected from the measuring locations were determined for each case. Second, a physics-based model using numerical methods (FEM) was built-up in order to simulate the dynamic behavior of the turbine. The model was validated with the results obtained from on-site tests that were carried out in an existing turbine. The deformations and the stresses of the runner under different operating conditions could be then computed. The calibrated model was used to analyze in detail the effect of misalignment between nozzle and runner. In historic cases, this abnormal operating condition lead to severe damage in the turbine, due to the effect of fatigue in some locations of the buckets. The model reproduced rather well the symptoms detected in the field measurements. The stresses could be calculated which eventually can be used to estimate the remaining useful life of the turbine. *Manuscript Click here to download Manuscript: Manuscript-Pelton.pdf Click here to view linked References
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