DEVELOPMENT OF AN INTEGRATED DATA ACQUISITION SYSTEM FOR HYDRO TURBINE GENERATOR UNIT USING LABVIEW

Abstract

The rapid evolution of Renewable Energy Sources (RESs) during the last two decades resulted in the installation of many renewable energy power systems all over the world such as small hydro, wind, solar, biomass based etc. The increasing application of these RESs requires use of data acquisition in order to collect data, regarding the installed system operation monitoring, control of its operation and performance evaluation purposes. In this dissertation, the development of a computer based data acquisition system for monitoring parameters and performance of Hydro Turbine Generator Unit (HTGU) is presented. Hydro power station needs simultaneous measurement and control of a number of variables located in different places in the station using suitable instruments placed close to the respective variables. The measurement data from these instruments can be acquired and implemented simultaneously, centrally and reliably by networking them with a computer. The proposed system consists of a set of transducers for measuring both non-electrical (e.g. turbine head, discharge, power, speed etc.) and electrical parameters (generator voltage, current, power, speed etc.).The collected data are first conditioned using precision electronic circuits and then interfaced to a Personal Computer (PC)/Laptop using data-acquisition modules. The National Instrument (NI) LabVIEW program is used to further process, display and store the collected data in the PC/laptop. The modern feature of this data acquisition system is to access and monitor the system using more user friendly graphical interface software. In context to above, using SHPs is an attractive and significant alternative among in renewable energies. Usually the SHPs situated in remote locations in hilly regions. Besides, that their monitoring is not quite easy. This dissertation is first focuses on the brief description of development of SHPs and application of Data Acquisition System (DAS). Then, it acquaints the readers with the HTGU experimental setup along with the data collection and interfacing process, data representation in LabVIEW, the experimental results, conclusion and discussion. This dissertation work helps to monitor all parameters of Small Hydropower Station in a single window on desktop. The proposed architecture permits the rapid system development and has the advantage of flexibility in the case of changes, while it can be easily iv extended for monitoring and control I/O (Input/output) of HTGU based Small Hydro Power (SHP) station operation by some essential hardware modifications. This may be also led to help in monitoring the SHPs remotely/wirelessly.