In Norwegian hydropower plants, it is not necessarily easy to do measurements since many of the power plants are from a time long before such measurements were possible to carry out or dream of carrying out.
Digitalisation
More measurement data can open up new opportunities for research and monitoring of the facilities.
Often this topic is put under the umbrella of digitalisation.
For HydroCen, digitalisation is a tool for enabling and improving research in areas related to hydropower. In these areas you will find everything from overall monitoring of biology, the environment, power plants and dams.
Monitoring for better maintenance and troubleshooting
The work in HydroCen is, among other things, about monitoring the condition of power plant components such as generators, turbines and transformers.
In addition, there is a desire to establish a system where models of different components can be linked together so that they can be studied together under the same conditions.
It is a desire to be able to use the information you get from this work to notice when something is wrong, or even better, notice that something is soon going to be wrong. This can be done both by finding a kind of fingerprint that is linked to a specific error in e.g. the turbine or through advanced machine learning to see patterns in the data that were previously not possible.