Around certain critical cases in stability studies in hydraulic engineering

Abstract

. It is considered the mathematical model of a benchmark hydroe-lectric power plant containing a water reservoir (lake), two water conduits (the tunnel and the turbine penstock), the surge tank and the hydraulic turbine; all distributed (Darcy-Weisbach) and local hydraulic losses are neglected,the only energy dissipator remains the throttling of the surge tank. Exponential stability would require asymptotic stability of the difference operator associated to the model. However in this case this stability is “fragile” i