Distributed Air-Gap Flux and Rotor-Current Fusion for Operating-Regime Identification in a 10-MW Kaplan Hydrogenerator

Eduardo Jr Piedad, Rafel Roig, Xavier Escaler, Eduardo Prieto-Araujo, Oriol Gomis-Bellmunt

Reliable monitoring of hydroelectric generators requires descriptors that capture both electrical loading and electromagnetic field behavior. This work investigates operating-regime identification in the Porjus U9 10-MW Kaplan hydrogenerator using synchronized measurements from ten stator-mounted Hall probes and six rotor-current channels. Seven steady guide-vane-opening settings are considered, and each 300s record is divided into 1s windows. The resulting windows are represented by spatial Fourier descriptors of the circumferential air-gap field, probe-wise temporal flux indicators, and channel-wise RMS rotor-current features. Correlation analysis and principal component analysis are used to examine how the feature groups vary with the operating point, and Random Forest, radial-basis-function support vector classification, and multilayer perceptron models are evaluated for supervised identification of the guide-vane-opening state. The analysis shows that RMS rotor-current features mainly track the loading axis, while the magnetic-flux features reveal complementary information associated with spatial imbalance, waveform distortion, and weak low-frequency modulation. Spatial descriptors alone provide limited separability, yielding test accuracies below 27%, whereas rotor-current features alone reach about 84-85%. Combining flux and current information gives the most discriminative representation; the SVC-RBF model achieves 99.5% test accuracy and macro-F1 score. The results indicate that distributed air-gap magnetic sensing, when fused with rotor-current measurements, can support accurate and interpretable data-driven monitoring of Kaplan hydrogenerator operating regimes.