Proposing a new advanced control technique for micro hydro power plants

Micro hydropower plants are emerging as a major renewable energy resource today as they do not encounter the problems of population displacement and environmental problems associated with the large hydro power plants. However, they require control systems to limit the huge variation in input flows expected in rivulets over which these are established to produce a constant power supply. This paper proposes an electric servomotor as a governor for a micro hydro, power plant especially those plants that are operated in isolated mode. An advanced controller is developed combining four control schemes for the control of the governor following the concept that the control action can be split up into linear and non-linear parts. The linear part of this controller contains an adaptive fast transversal filter (FTF) algorithm and normalized LMS (nLMS) algorithm. The non-linear part of the controller incorporates Fuzzy PI and a neural network. The concept behind splitting the control action is reasoned out and the conditions for stability of the controller are proved. The new controller has a superior performance compared to other control schemes. (c) 2007 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.