CONDITION MONITORING SYSTEM FOR SMALL HYDRO POWER PLANT

Abstract

The performance of small hydro power plant is to be monitored continuously for high output or higher efficiency. The monitoring of plant is also required to avoid any wrong operation of plant equipment. In order that the efficiency of the plant is higher and the shutdown due to break down is lesser, condition monitoring of hydro power plant is required. Monitoring the plant is always a challenging job because of the physical distance involved between the points of observation of various parameters, so, there is need for a system that brings all data of interest at one place which can be interpreted easily by an operator. The aim of this thesis work is to develop an instrumentation system for small hydro power plant which would acquire data from the field and make it available over internet. The relevant parameters for evaluating the performance of small hydro power plants are flow, pressure, level and output power. Here, an instrumentation system has been developed for acquiring these data using commercially available industrial sensors and transmit it via radio signals to the data acquisition system. This system has been implemented using Lab VIEW platform and tested on a hydro power plant model in hydro-mechanical laboratory of Alternate hydro energy center, IIT Roorkee. The efficiency of the model was found to be 50%.