Increasing the Flow Power in High Pressure Transient Pipes of Hydroelectric Power Plants Using Particle Swarm Optimization Algorithm

Employment of hydroelectric power plants is considered as one of the strategies to overcome the water shortages in the world. On the other hand, increasing the generated electricity by using of water energy is of importance. Regarding to the high cost of construction of dam and supplying the required hydraulic head of hydro power stations, the optimum design of these stations has been considered. Penstock, among the components of these stations, has a special place. The importance of penstock is due to its high manufacturing, installation and maintenance costs which assign nearly thirty percent of the plant’s expenditures to itself. Therefore, optimal design of this hydraulic structure will play a significant role in lowering the construction costs of hydro power stations. The use of meta-heuristic optimization algorithms for optimization of different structures has been one of the most important issues in designing of these structures. Among the meta-heuristic algorithms Particle Swarm Optimization has been considered as a powerful method in many fields. The purpose of this research is to present an optima sketch to maximize the power of jet streams reaching the turbines and also reduction the pressure losses through penstocks for controlling the transient flows. The results show that the energy losses have totally been decreased from 29.11meters to 11.92meters. This reduction lead to increasing the efficiency and performance of high pressure pipes. The pressure losses due to sudden changes in flow condition (before optimization) are 315.9kpa which by optimization of the penstocks decreased to 116.7kpa. This reveals that by reduction in pressure losses, the damages caused by transient flows are greatly decreased. Also, the power of flow increased from 25MW to 28MW, which equals 11%.