PhD defense alert: Daan Truijen

Power Take-Off and Control for Contra-Rotating Pump-Turbines in Hydropower Storage

You are invited to join the PhD Defense of:

Name: Daan Truijen

Title: Power Take-Off and Control for Contra-Rotating Pump-Turbines in Hydropower Storage

Topic:  

To further the integration of renewable energy, energy storage is becoming increasingly important. Pumped-storage hydropower is a mature technology with a long lifetime, but it is traditionally limited to mountainous regions. The European ALPHEUS project breaks this barrier using a novel contra-rotating reversible pump-turbine (CR RPT) with two runners rotating in the opposite direction, which increases efficiency at low heads and high flow rates. This dissertation describes the design of the power take-off (PTO) and control architectures that enable the CR RPT to provide short-term storage and grid services, such as frequency control.

First, two PTO concepts are designed using axial-flux (AF) PMSMs, in which the runners are driven with a variable speed ratio. In addition to a rim-driven concept, a new asymmetric shaft-driven PTO with coaxial shafts is proposed. Next, two new control strategies are proposed, designed to optimize the power response and efficiency. Dynamic power constraints are applied to meet grid requirements for frequency control. First, a novel feedback-based control is proposed which, based on offline optimization, controls the rotational speeds to meet a power setpoint at the optimal efficiency. Here, the power constraints are converted into torque constraints. To validate the control, a test-setup is developed featuring a reduced-scale CR RPT and AF-PMSMs. Additionally, a novel nonlinear Model Predictive Controller (MPC) is proposed. Besides reducing actuator effort, the MPC significantly accelerates the power response with a negligible loss of efficiency.

Date defense: 16 January 2026 | 17.30 PM

Online: click here to follow online