COMPUTER AIDED PLANNING OF CANAL BASED SMALL HYDRO PROJECT

Abstract

Hydropower is being used widely all over the world. Small Hydro Power, which is renewable energy source, is being given more attention in present world situation comprising of rapidly depleting fossil fuels, increasing power demand and environmental problems. In order to achieve economical viability of SHP developments, special attention is required for planning of SHP projects. In case of canal based small Hydro project, the project layout is dependent on equipment layout drawings, which are not available at the time of planning of projects. At the time of planning of project, the size of civil structures and cost involved are to be worked out. If project cost is overestimated at the time of planning, then project maybe rejected on the. basis. of high project cost. On the other hand, if project cost is underestimated than there will be lot of problem at the time of construction of project due to cost overrun, and consequently time overrun and to select. Hydro-Mechanical equipments, particularly. turbines that play a. key role in hydropower. Software may be developed which may be helpful in deciding various parameters related to SHP project development. Under present study, software named TURBNPRO and EasyNN-plus ANN software have . been used for study• and planning of some canal based SHP sites and application for determination of hydro turbine design parameters for these sites. TURBNPRO was used to generate data sets by varying the head and discharge conforming to different site conditions. Further EasyNN-plus is , used to train and validate these data by creating ANN model. Than this model is used to determine various hydro turbine design parameters for various canal based SHP sites of Bihar. state under planning stage. Later on, these hydro turbine design, parameters . are compared with the output obtained from TURBNPRO and Guaranteed iii Technical Specifications for these sites, in order to review the accuracy of these networks. For planning of civil works data of ten canal based SHP projects of Bihar state have been taken. These are upstream substructure, downstream substructure and powerhouse dimensions data. These are used to train ANN network. This network is used to plot curves of upstream substructure, downstream substructure and powerhouse dimensions versus Head at different discharge, which can be used for planning of civil works of other canal based SHP. In addition ANN software has been developed for planning of maintenance requirements of E&M equipment. For development of this network, the data was obtained from ongoing canal project. iv