UNIVERSITI TENAGA NASIONAL

COLLEGE OF ENGINEERING

DEPARTMENT OF MECHANICAL ENGINEERING

MPRB412: PROJECT 1

PROGRESS REPORT 1

AUTHOR : RAJA SYABBEER AHMAD BIN RAJA MOHAMMED

ID : ME 092826

SECTION : 1

SUPERVISOR : SAIFUL HASMADY BIN ABU HASSAN, Dr.

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 Table of Content

I. Abstract . 3

II. Literature Review 4

III. Problem Statement . 5-12

IV. Objective . 13-16

V. Methodology . 17-19

VI. References . 20-27

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Abstract

Small hydro power plant is a power generation plant that produce electricity to peoples. It is

considered as renewable energy since the source use to produce power is the river. The

concept of power generation is where the potential energy converted to electrical energy by

using the generator from rotation work of turbine by the water flow rate of the river.

Generally, small hydro did not high energy, and sometimes it used as flood mitigation,

irrigation, and control. There are lot of small hydro around the world especially Malaysia, but

the improvement of small hydro quite slow. This paper present the improvement of small

hydro power plant by enhancing the existing design with higher head and analyses by using

computational fluid dynamic software.

Literature Review

As stated before, the optimizations in small hydro is slow. Some literature review was done

to observe the present study on improving and upgrading small hydro plant. Here are some

optimizations that have been done by researchers.

Molina et al. [1] a propose new advance structure for a micro hydro power plant (MHPP)

based on lighter, smaller and more efficient higher-speed turbine. In their work, the existing

design use a fixed speed turbine where the design can reach high efficiency but it has complex

mechanism and too expensive for a small hydro. They proposed design that used a turbine

that can operate in any flow rate condition and synchronous with the generator. Moreover,

the installation of power conditioning system used for connecting the hydro power station

with the distribution grid will lead to fast response and enhanced performance of the control.

However, the different speed of turbine will lead to different frequency where in Malaysia

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the frequency stated is fix range around 50 to 60 Hz. Hence, the design cannot be applied to

Malaysia small hydro power plant.

Rahi et. al [2] have done simulation studies for refurbishment and uprating the hydro power

plant. They stated that the maintenance aspect make the most important contribution to

improve the availability and reliability of hydro generator excitation system in order to

increase power generation. In their paper, 3 case of excitation which are DC, AC and static

excitations have been simulated and it was proven that static excitation give the fastest

response. However, numerical excitation is considered best but keeping in view the cost and

man power involved a trade off is required and static excitation qualifies well in such a

situation.

Thorbun and Leigon [3] in their case study of upgrading potential for small hydro power stated

that they manage to upgrade the generator with new generator and use cable wound stator

rather than a transformer for voltage change. They manage to improve power from 8.9 to 9.4

MW per generator where there is two generator upgraded. In order to achieve the goal, three

things need to be control are changing transformer with powerformer, turbine power is fully

used and the power factor is set to unity. However, the turbine operation will be varies in

Malaysia based on the demand of villagers.

Finally, another option for optimization is rubber or inflatable hydro dam. Shahid ul islam et.

al [4], have proposed inflatable hydro dam at India. Their study compared the imported

inflatable dam with India inflatable dam which is very different in efficiency. The imported

inflatable dam is 31% more efficient then Indian inflatable dam. The result show that the cost

of imported rubber dam is effective and energy efficient. However, at Malaysia, the most

possible rubber dam location are at Sg Piah and Cenderoh hydro power plants. After

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calculation, the cost of installation and the lost of power during the installation work is not

effective. Furthermore, Shirozi et. al [5] found from the analysis using ANSYS software that

rubber dam become rigid when inflated to high pressure which result in small deformation

while the upstream is changed. The analysis was done using ANSYS software.

Problem Statement

How to increase head of a small hydro in order to improve power generation and

efficiency?

How to simulate the design in order to analyse the important calculations?

What is the parameters involve and how the parameters effect the efficiency?

Objective

Design and development of a mechanism to enhanced head of small hydro.

Simulate and analyse the design by using computational fluid dynamic.

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References

[1] M. G. Molina and M. Pacas, Improved power conditioning system of micro-hydro

power plant for distributed generation applications, 2010 IEEE Int. Conf. Ind.

Technol., pp. 17331738, 2010.

[2] O. P. Rahi and G. Kumar, Simulation Studies for Refurbishment and Uprating of

Hydro Power Plants, PES Gen. Meet. / Conf. Expo. 2014 IEEE, pp. 15, 2014.

[3] K. Thorburn and M. Leijon, Case study of upgrading potential for a small hydro

power station, Renew. Energy, vol. 30, no. 7, pp. 10911099, 2005.

[4] S. U. Islam and A. Kumar, Inflatable dams for shp projects, Renew. Sustain. Energy

Rev., vol. 57, pp. 945952, 2016.

[5] N. Cheraghi-Shirazi, A. R. Kabiri-Samani, and B. Boroomand, Numerical analysis of

rubber dams using fluid-structure interactions, Flow Meas. Instrum., vol. 40, pp. 91

98, 2014.