Piecewise Causality Study between Power Load and Vibration in Hydro-Turbine Generator Unit for a Low-Carbon Era

With the rapid development of wind and photovoltaic power generation, hydro-turbine generator units have to operate in a challenging way, resulting in obvious vibration problems. Because of the significant impact of vibration on safety and economical operation, it is of great significance to study the causal relationship between vibration and other variables. The complexity of the hydro-turbine generator unit makes it difficult to analyze the causality of the mechanism. This paper studied the correlation based on a data-driven method, then transformed the correlation into causality based on the mechanism. In terms of correlation, traditional research only judges whether there is a correlation between all data. When the data with correlation are interfered with by the data without correlation, the traditional methods cannot accurately identify the correlation. A piecewise correlation method based on change point detection was proposed to fill this research gap. The proposed method segmented time series pairs, then analyzed the correlation between subsequences. The causality between power load and vibration of a hydro-turbine generator unit was further analyzed. It indicated that when the power load is less than 200 MW, the causality is weak, and when the power load is greater than 375 MW, the causality is strong. The results show that the causality between vibration and power load is not fixed but piecewise. Furthermore, the piecewise correlation method compensated for the limitation of high variance of the maximum information coefficient.