Model-free based water level control for hydroelectric power plants

Overview & Synopsis

Automatic water level control methods for open channels have difficulties to keep good performances for a large range of flow and significant unknown disturbances. A new concept called "model-free control" is applied in this paper for hydroelectric run-of-the river power plants. To modulate power generation, a level trajectory is planned for cascaded power plants. Numerous dynamic simulations show that with a simple and robust control algorithm, the set-point is followed even in severe operating conditions.