On the Expected Monetary Value of Hydroelectric Turbine Start-up Protocol Optimisation

Hydroelectric turbine start-up protocols have a significant influence on the fatigue reliability of such asset. Fatigue cracking, is one of the two main degradation mechanisms and often considered the most difficult to predict. Using fatigue reliability model previously developed by the authors, we study the influence of changes in the start-up protocol. Two units are studied. For the first unit, two protocols are studied and for the second unit three protocols are considered. The goal of the study is to look at the expected monetary value (EMV) as a metric able to combine the expected probability of failure with the monetary consequence of such failure. Our results shows that such metric is suitable to identify which start-up protocol is the most advantageous and why?