This paper shows an improvisation for gas turbine power plants. It incorporates a hydraulic compressor to compress air prior to combustion. The aim is to reduce in-house consumption of the power generated in the turbine, thus increasing the overall efficiency of the power plant. The proposed compressor could also be used in different scenarios.

Hydroelectric power plants are known for their ability to cover variations of the consumption in electrical power networks. In order to follow this changing demand, hydraulic machines are subject to off-design operation. In that case, the swirling flow leaving the runner of a Francis turbine may act under given conditions as an excitation source for the whole hydraulic system. In high load oper...

Nowadays, hydropower plays an essential role in the energy market. Due to their fast response and regulation capacity, hydraulic turbines operate at off-design conditions with a high number of starts and stops. In this situation, dynamic loads and stresses over the structure are high, registering some failures over time, especially in the runner. Therefore, it is important to know the dynamic r...

Field performance testing of hydraulic turbines is undertaken to define the head-power-discharge relationship, which identify the turbine’s peak operating point. This relationship is essential for the efficient operation of a hydraulic turbine. Unfortunately, in some cases it is not feasible to field test turbines due to time, budgetary, or other constraints. Gordon (2001) proposed a method of ...

The present hydraulic variable-pitch mechanism of wind turbine uses three hydraulic cylinders to drive three crank and connecting rod mechanisms respectively; the blades are moved with the cranks. The hydraulic variable-pitch mechanism has complex structure, occupies a lot of space and its maintenance is trouble. In order to make up for the shortcomings of hydraulic cylinder variable-pitch syst...

Hydraulic turbine runner has a complex structure, and traditional location methods can't meet its requirement. This paper describes a source location of cracks in turbine blades by combining kernel independent component analysis (KICA) with wavelet neural network (WNN). The research shows that the location accuracy of WNN combined with KICA feature extraction is the best comparing with the resu...

The objective of the paper is to develop a novel intelligent pitch control system of a 2MW wind turbine driven by variable-speed hydraulic pump-controlled system. For realizing the intelligent pitch controller, self-organizing fuzzy sliding mode control, which combines fuzzy sliding mode control and self-organizing modifier, is proposed. In order to verify the proposed concept experimentally, a...

Three-dimensional numerical simulations are carried out by commercial software STAR-CCM+ to investigate the hydraulic transient and flow behaviours of a prototype pump-turbine during the normal shutdown process. The global characteristics and pressure fluctuations are analysed as the pump-turbine runs through the turbine mode, into the turbine braking mode, and finally into the reversed pump mo...