Model-Free Based Water Level Control for Hydroelectric Power Plants

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.