Condition monitoring and fault diagnostics for hydropower plants

•CMFD system for hydropower plants has been developed.•CMFD is based on the IPS2 concept, in which the customer, turbine supplier, and maintenance provider are the stakeholders.•CMFD has been implemented on a pilot hydropower plant.•A SVM classifier was used for fault diagnostics.•The performance of SVM was evaluated and the best fault classification model was selected and evaluated.

This paper presents a condition monitoring and fault diagnostics (CMFD) system for hydropower plants (HPP). CMFD is based on the concept of industrial product-service systems (IPS2), in which the customer, turbine supplier, and maintenance service provider are the IPS2 stakeholders. The proposed CMFD consists of signal acquisition, data transfer to the virtual diagnostics center (VDC) and fault diagnostics. A support vector machine (SVM) classifier has been used for fault diagnostics. CMFD has been implemented on an HPP with three Kaplan units. A signal acquisition system for CMFD consists of data acquisition from a unit control system and a supplementary system for high-frequency data acquisition. The implemented SVM method exhibits high training accuracy and thus enables adequate fault diagnostics. The data are analyzed in the VDC, which allows all stakeholders access to diagnostic information from anywhere at any time. Based on this information, the service providers can establish condition-based maintenance and offer operational support. Furthermore, through the VDC, cooperation between the stakeholders can be achieved; thus, better maintenance scheduling is possible, which will be reflected in higher system availability.