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Thursday, July 11, 2013

LOADSHARING GOVERNORS

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When two diesel engines are synchronised either electrically or mechanically (geared) then obviously the speeds must be constant. It is the governor characteristics which determines how the load is shared between the two machines.

The figure shows the characteristic for a governor with droop compared to one which is isochronous. It can be seen that there is a fall in speed as the load is increased.

This droop is necessary for parallel operation of the machines if stable operation is to be achieved.

If we consider the case of two diesel alternators operating in parallel then the required characteristics and the load sharing operation is shown in the following figure.



The top left diagram shows the situation after synchronising with all the load taken by machine number 1. As the speed control of number 2 is increased it takes part of the load and at the same time the frequency is increased. The bottom centre diagram shows the situation after the speed control on number one machine is reduced giving more load to number 2 machine and returning frequency back to normal.

From this it should be obvious that load sharing is achieved by alteration of the fuel setting of the machines.

If the governor characteristics are isochronous then there will be no crossing points along the characteristics and the load sharing will be unstable. If droop is incorporated on at least one machine then there will always be a crossing point at any given load and stable operation will be achieved.

This is shown on the following characteristics for the case of isochronous governors and for both having droop.

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