Sergey Pankratov, Head of "Energy Generation" Department at NKF VOLGA Group

About

For more than 20 years, "Volga group" has been providing engineering consulting for the water industry – firstly physical measurements and computer modeling of water flows for large water users (hydro, thermal and nuclear generation). We are partner of the Danish Hydraulic Institute (DHI) using MIKE DHI Software Family.

Volga implements water flow measurement systems based on the acoustic multi-path Transit-Time and Doppler methods in large size conduits - both closed and open. For hydro power stations, the application of this method is mostly found in turbine’s penstocks and derivation channels. The measurement system provides continuous flow measurement with an accuracy of up to 0.5%, throughout the hydroelectric unit’s entire life.

An integration of the measurement results into plant’s SCADA allows to collect long-term historical data for different operation modes, constantly and continuously monitoring and to optimize the efficiency of each unit, redistribute the load between units in order to increase the integral performance of the plant up to 1% - 5%, and even more. For Kaplan turbines, the performance for every individual unit can be also increased.

This system allows also to verify turbine’s hydraulic performance tests and to control warranty obligations, declared by the manufacturer. Other important applications are penstock leakage detection, water billing and pipe rupture monitoring.

Monitoring of deviations of the turbine's physical operating parameters to historical data values allows to carry out preventive unit’s maintenance and repair, just when needed. This leads to lower operating costs and increases the overall lifetime of the unit.

In condenser conduits of thermal power plant using acoustic transit-time flow meters allows to estimate a real-time efficiency of the condenser. In most cases, condenser conduits have a very small straight part, that makes using multi-path acoustic Transit-Time flow meters a single way to measure discharge and temperature in conduits of thermal power plant condensers.

Information

Industry experience

Education: M.B.A

Seniority: Manager, Director, Professor

Years of experience: 10 to 20 years