Condition monitoring for the identification of behavioral changes in hydropower units

The purpose of this project is to develop tools and methods that make it possible to identify behavioral changes in individual hydropower units, to enable targeted maintenance and to learn more about how changed operating conditions affect the lifetime of the unit.

The increased need for electricity regulation due to more use of other renewable energy sources means that hydropower units are controlled and worn in a different way than before. This increases both the need for maintenance as well as the risk of unexpected breakdowns, which makes it difficult to estimate the future costs of the present regulation strategies. Therefore, there is a need for tools and methods that make it possible to identify behavioral changes in hydropower units to make targeted maintenance efforts and, by extension, enable the industry to study and learn more about how the wear of individual hydropower units is affected by different operating conditions. For this to be practical, automated monitoring methods and decision support tools that guide maintenance personnel are required. Therefore, this project aims to develop automated methods for condition monitoring.