Intro_and_Background

ATECo Response

Actuation Test Equipment Introduction and Background

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This presentation describes the Index Test Box Constant Power method testing procedures used to optimize a Kaplan turbine.

Here are a few references from the Internet that will provide a good background to know and understand Professor Kaplan and his turbine.

Anyone that has ever analyzed index test data to optimize a Kaplan turbine will tell you that steady-state data is essential to getting the best results."

When index-testing older Kaplan hydroelectric units with vintage governing and control equipment, steady-state operation is established by disabling automatic governors and 3-D cams and then

positioning gates and blades discreetly with dedicated gate and blade manual controls.

Specific gate and blade positions for an index-test are defined .

Executing the test consists of manually setting the desired gate and blade positions manually and then holding everything as steady as possible and monitoring for external disturbances.

Data capture technique is to move something, (gates or blades), wait two minutes for the unit to settle out, and then recording discreet measurements for 3-minutes and averaging.

The Index Test Box statistically analyzes the data in a sliding-window for “SteadyStateness” using a proprietary algorithm originally developed for the ITB at Woodward Governor by this author.

It was easy with daily access to the finest minds in this orgainzation.

The functionality of this algorithm was demonstrated for DOE in 1986.

Lee H. Sheldon was a hydropower specialist working at Bonneville Power Administration. This author found Lee by an IWP&DC magazine article from 1982.

1982-01 Field Testing hydro turbines (Lee Sheldon)

Bonneville Power Administration purchased an ITB with hopes to test/demonstrate it at Bonneville Dam. USACE declined this offer.

BPA moved their test to Portland General Electric's PGE-PHP2 powerhouse, about 30 miles East of Portland, Oregon.

Test reports were prepared by DOE, PGE and Woodward's new engineer on this project, Terry Bauman.
http://engineering.myindialist.com/2009/lab-manual-kaplan-turbine/
The next test for ITB was at Wells Dam.

The ITB algorithm for the automated Constant Power test took over 1/2 hour to execute to completion, best case. It the data is noisy and much of it is discarded, then the process takes longer.

The situation at Wells was a "worst case scenario" for index testing, water levels that move up and down rapidily over the course of a day, which precluded the lengthy time interval requred by the initial ITB software flowchart configuration.

Excellent, low cost & plentiful instrumentation and pre-digitized data signals from digital electronic control systems on hydroelectric units make capturing data for Kaplan turbine optimization cheap and easy.

The current preferred method is to reconfigure the governor to facilitate off-cam blade angles and reprogram the powerplant station datalogger to cpture the required data.

The powerplant data logger was setup to record the signals in Fig 1 every 1/2 second.

This data is extracted onto a thumb drive and mailed to me for analysis.

ITX_DataHeader
Table-1 Data format for station data logger output files.

An 8Gigabyte (8GB) thumb drive (about $15) carries almost a year of data collected in this way.

The data set being analyzed for Off-cam performance is from 11/16/2010 at 16:54:32 to 12/08/2010.

These files were recorded by the Clergue data logger.

They take up 980MB.

The first On-Cam thumbdrive has:
On-Cam DataSize
OnCam1 OnCam2

The data files from ITX20100720 to ITX20101116 had sensor problems and were discarded.

The remaining usable Off-cam data on the second thumbdrive data was just under 1GB.

Description: Off-cam
Description: Off-CamData1
Fig-2 Off-Cam data files on thumb drive.

The data files from ITX20100720 to ITX20101116 had sensor problems and were discarded.

SteadyState points are identified by a proprietary method and sorted into three different ways, each facilitating one of the Kaplan turbine test methods from this list:

Constant head & gate and swept blades, flow & power.

3-D cam optimization for this dog-n-pony show focuses on the data listed in Fig-2.

SteadyState Analysis

Data is loaded from the thumbdrive files into the ITB RAM in time-blocks.

This demonstration has the blocks set at 2-hours.

A sliding window traverses this data block, plucking out SteadyState points whenever they occur.

The SteadyState discriminator overview is shown in this image.

For this example, a sliding window, 5.8 minutes long is stepped through the 2-hour block of data at intervals of 1.6 minutes. both values are easily configured on the right-side control panel.

When the discriminator detects SteadyState operation as defined by the Limits Table on the lower right, a green vertical line is drawn through the SteadyState point across all the StripCharts and a family of data files is saved that sorts the SteadyState points into Constant Power, Constant Blade or Constant

Constant Gate formats.

Description: Analysis Loop

From left to right, this data set shows:

Count = the SteadyState counter for this data file.

Filename = the DateCode for every data set. ITX is BRP’s identifier for the Index Test Box data for Clergue, individual file ID is coded as YYYYMMDD. The date coded into this filename is the file-creation date.

Date & Time(2Hr) = the individual time-stamp for each SteadyState data point.

Time(2Hr=1) = TimeLog date stamp for Excel plotting.

Timer(Secs) = time of day in seconds for Excel plotting.

TimeVal = row number of highest row in the 1000 row block (5-minutes at 2Hz) of this SteadyState point.

U1Ohead = Operating Head of unit, this is the measured value from powerhouse instrumentation. Placement of pressure taps is critical to this signal. Powerplant blueprints show that

U1Gate(%) = Unit 1 Gate Stroke in percent.

U1Bld(%) = Unit 1 Blade Angle in percent.

U1 Flw(cms) = Unit 1 flow in cubic meters/second. This measurement is a differential pressure transducer located underneath the unit, with inlet pressure taps of a Pitot Tube at the front of the unit with a static reference pressure at the back of the bulb just in front of the gates.

U1Pwr(MW) = the WattMeter measurement of output power.

Background Information on Turbine Types	Viktor Kaplan Kaplan Turbine	James B. Francis Francis Turbines	Lester Allan Pelton Pelton Turbines	Bulb Turbines
About ATECo	Constant Power Method	Blade Regulated Unit
Introduction: Index Test Box Off-Line testing	Winter-Kennedy Transducer Cart	ITB WK Pressure Cart	Pitch To France	Pitot-Tube Flowmeter

Index Testing for Fun and Profit (QuickTime) (WMV)

Baawitigong - A Historical Perspective on Hydropower in Sault Ste. Marie (WMV)

A Forensic Examination of a Bonneville Dam Index Test (QuickTime) (WMV)

Earlier Practice Movies

Full Span Graph Links to "wmv" File	WebPage	Zoom Span Graph Links to "wmv" File	WebPage
10/10/07 00h06m00s	HTML	10/10/07 00h06m00s	HTML
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Reisch

ITB and JLO Pitch to Accusonic

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