Modeling the Excitation Control System of a Hydropower Controller in Modelica

Hydropower technologies are crucial to provide flexibility, reliability, and stability to the grid compared to other renewable energy technologies. Therefore, the number of hydropower plants, mainly the small-scale plants, are still increasing worldwide. In order to build the small-scale power plants, proper planning is essential to minimize the cost and environmental impact. To achieve it, accurate modeling and simulation of the existing plants is necessary to predict the new plant’s behavior before beginning the construction process. The thesis’s main objective was to create a digital twin of the real-life hydropower controller HYMAREG 10’s excitation control system developed by Hymatek Controls AS. The generated models during the thesis were mainly object-oriented modeled in Modelica modeling language with the help of the standard Modelica library and OpenIPSL in the Dymola software tool. All the models were simulated individually to examine the behavior of the controllers and the limiters. The simulation results showed reasonable behavior of each model, but still, proper tuning and further development are required to obtain accurate behavior as a real controller. Most importantly, the models need to be compared with an actual plant in the future to verify the model’s behavior