Optimising hydropower plants with efficient filtration solutions

Optimising hydropower plants with efficient filtration solutionsHYDAC – Your partner for tailor-made and robust filtration solutions in hydropower plants

Increasing industrialisation, especially in the emerging markets, is leading to continual rises in energy requirements. Small hydropower plants are particularly well-suited to meeting this need with renewable energy from hydropower plants – they are considerably easier to install, allowing them to be put into operation faster. There is an increasing demand for low-maintenance systems at the moment. This is because this type of compact hydropower plant can be operated worldwide.

Hydropower plants also need to be able to withstand all kinds of environmental influences – torrential rain and monsoon rain, for example, which both lead to a high level of contamination in river water. Robust and efficient key components and technologies which ensure operation are in-demand here. The supply of cooling water and process water is especially important for this.

With the help of our HYDAC experts, you can optimise your hydropower plants in terms of the factors mentioned above. Using the example of a customer, we will show you what a robust and low-maintenance filtration solution in a hydropower plant can look like.

The HYDAC solution:
optimal process water filtration for water turbine shaft seals with ATF filter technology

Why is optimal process water filtration especially important for water turbine shaft seals? The shaft seal is a water-lubricated bearing which forms the core of the hydropower plant. It is also used to separate the clean process water from the contaminated river water.

With conventional filtration solutions, a water pump is also required to pump the river water through the filter and to the shaft seal. This increases the energy requirement as well as the number of (electrical) components used. If the filter is contaminated, the system must be shut down to change the filter – alternatively, it can be switched to a redundant system. This does, however, increase the power plant's complexity and operating costs. The topic of safety also plays a big role: if the supply to the shaft seal fails, the whole hydropower plant must be shut down as there would be a high safety risk otherwise.

Our aim was to supply the best solution to the problem so that the water from the penstock upstream of the water turbine could be directly used for the shaft seal. Our ATF filter was best suited to this – a cyclone filter with an additional filter element.

With the use of the HYDAC ATF filter, an additional water pump in the system was no longer necessary. The filter element was also constantly cleaned by a "desludging" line. This ensured a continuous supply of cleaned water to the shaft seal – allowing a simple and straightforward solution to the problem.

The result

The HYDAC ATF filtration solution made an important contribution to optimising the hydropower plant. The new technological approach (supplying the shaft seal directly from the penstock) convinced the customer straight away.

After the successful test of the prototype in the power plant, the customer was assured of its function and our expertise. Immediately after this success, our solution was established as the standard for all further power plant projects with the above requirements.

In addition to ATF water filtration for the shaft seal, we also supplied wall panels for operation of the shaft seal, lubrication systems and water-glycol cooling systems for the closed cooling circuit.

Our customer's case shows how our product solutions and engineering expertise increase system efficiency while protecting budgets. Speak to our industry experts now to optimise your systems – our HYDAC specialists provide you with the optimal filtration solution as well additional components and solutions for your process water filtration.