Over on brushless.zone, we’ve come across an interesting write-up that details the construction of a dam control system. This is actually the second part, in the first, we learn that some friends purchased an old dysfunctional 80 kW dam with the intention of restoring it. One friend was in charge of the business paperwork, one friend the mechanical side of things, and the other was responsible for the electronics — you can probably guess which ones we’re interested in.
The site controller is built around a Nucleo-H753 featuring the STM32H753ZI microcontroller, which was selected due to it being the largest single-core version of the dev board available. This site controller board features a dozen output light switches, sixteen front-panel button inputs, dual 24 V PSU inputs, multiple non-isolated analog inputs, atmospheric pressure and temperature sensors, multiple analog multiplexers, a pair of SSD1309 OLED screens, and an ESP32 for internet connectivity. There’s also fiber optic TX and RX for talking to the valve controller, a trio of isolated hall-effect current sensors for measuring the generator phase current, through current transformers, four contactor outputs (a contactor is a high-current relay), a line voltage ADC, and the cherry on top — an electronic buzzer.
The valve controller has: 48 V input from either the PSU or battery, motor phase output, motor field drive output, 8 kV rated isolation relay, limit switch input, the other side of the optical fiber TX and RX for talking to the site controller board, and connectors for various purposes.
If you’re interested in seeing this dam control system being tested, checkout the video embedded below.
What doe DAM stand for?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dam_(disambiguation)
It is a damn dam! (snerk)
That threw me for a loop, too. Took me a solid 15 seconds to latch onto hydroelectric.
Very cool project. Read both guys’ blogs on it.
First reading the title I thought about Direct Access Memory:)
Direct Memory Access though
What a project! I’m torn between how much fun I would have doing this and how much of a money pit this would end up.
And it has a choice between text and video for the antivideo among us.
I do certainly enjoy a well edited longform video on a subject, but having it be an option in addition to a well written project log or explanation is the ideal.
Nice.
be aware though that small dams like these (or any dam) are not considered so environmentally friendly as they used to be: It is a steep barrier for fish to scale. From the pictures from the overflow it looks that might be doable, but please install some kind of fish ladder if possible.
Absolutely. I’d hate to see another 1000 hectare lake that supports many hundreds of thousands of fish of dozens of different species drained and destroyed by environmentalists so that 10 or 12 individuals of a single species per day can transit through the muddy stream left behind. Not to mention the loss of a clean, nearly limitless source of power.
… and the individuals now passing the dam site eat the breed of the species which found a refuge in the area somewhat protected from the predators by the dam, and the trees on the shore now struck with much faster stream and lower and varying ground water levels die and get replaced by more common species growing everywhere…
While smaller weirs may not be as much of a barrier as they seem on first sight, from the pictures of this dam I would consider a careful observation of the biotopes above and below before installing an uncontrolled gateway between these two.
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Are fish escalators an option?
They’re better than bicycles.
Or, HAD recently, a dammed fish on a dicycle.
I think I just hurt my own brain.
Yes, sort of – there are “elevators” for them.
https://www.hged.com/community-environment/barrett-fishway/default.aspx
Also the “Tesla valve” variants are really cool to watch.
https://www.reddit.com/media?url=https%3A%2F%2Fi.redd.it%2Fo1glwznkeumd1.jpeg
That is cool. Odd — how smart are fish? I guess they’re just driven — but cool!
They seem to head towards fast running water (i.e rapids) and hop from rock to rock, resting in the eddys behind rocks. Looks like an efficient way to climb elevation changes in rivers. We have a cool fish ladder in our town where there’s a big weir/low head dam as part of a diverter to a hydro plant. it’s just a side channel with big rocks in it and enough water moving through it to make it appealing for the fish. Looking down on it from a conveniently placed bridge, you can see fish heading straight forward it rather than heading up to the much larger span of weir/low head dam.
This dam is 160 years old. While new dams should definitely be employing modern environmental impact mitigation, the area here has long since adapted and any blind changes may actually have negative consequences.
A 160 year old dam reservoir is almost certainly silted up.
Which would explain it being abandoned.
Bet it’s ‘pool’ resembles a swampy field.
The real killer will be the physical turbine, silty water is even more erosive.
Bet the buckets look like surface of moon.
Plus only run of river makes it must run, so power much less valuable.
Not that the power company will be excited about .08 Mw.
That depends on location. Not all places need fish ladders because there are no migrating fish. Where I live dams actually create huge eco systems for fish and wild life and thier impacts are minimal because we do not have migrating species like salmon.
That is the problem with a lot of the environmentalist movements. They want to cast everything into neat ‘good’ or ‘bad’ bins when most things are gray and need to be looked at a case by case basis. More over it’s self defeating as there are cases in the Pacific northwest where they want to decom dams that don’t even see salmon migration becuase if this all dams are bad thinking, and that power generation will just be replaced by burning more fossil fuels.
I do not like the monolithic PCB. One major *uckup and you are left with a plethora of bodge components or PCB patches and a jungle of wires because of no time/$$ to re-spin the board. Also any major upgrade would not be easy or even feasible. And the H753 is bugged af and using it in any mission-critical scenario without an moderately sophisticated micro-based watchdog is what we call here a call to devil for help.
Nevertheless, good luck with such a endeavor!
I’m glad you said this.
While this is a cool project, the mission success criticality of this project should’ve necessitated a PLC. The AutomationDirect Click Plus line would’ve been a great budget choice, or if you were feeling fancy a Beckhoff CX system. Hell, probably could’ve gotten away with a Raspberry Pi running Codesys and a couple of etherCAT modules would’ve probably also done the trick.
Take all the dam pictures you want!
This is neat but I hope this is a very small, rural lake. Homebrewing a major piece of infrastructure is sketchy at best and reckless at worst. Dam failures can impact peopleain huge ways including loss of life, even in small setups. Stuff like this should be using industry standard, proven solutions.
I applaud the engineering and think it’s cool, but some projects have considerations far beyond this.