Last week Tina and I visited the Old Walls Hydro site in Ponsworthy on Dartmoor. Water is taken from the West Webburn river and diverted along a leat to give a 16 metre head of water for two turbines. As a piece of engineering it is fascinating.
Various aspects of the design reminded me of some operational research principles. For parts of the design, the owners were told that what they proposed was impossible. How many times does an O.R. scientist or team meet such prejudice? Too often. Sometimes the problem is posed with a feasible region that is too small, simply because nobody has pushed the limits. Beware of incorrect definitions of feasibility!
Then, there were matters of feedback. One of these concerned filtering the water before it entered the pipes to the turbines. Leaves and other vegetation falls into the leat and is trapped on a wire mesh conveyor belt. Once sensors detect that there is a difference in the level of water before and after this screen, a motor starts and removes a "belt-load" of debris. How should this be powered? The simple answer would be to take the power from the turbines ... but that can be affected by the presence of the debris and could cause the system to collapse. So, the motor is isolated from the hydro power. It runs on a small battery, which of course is then trickle charged from the turbines. The O.R. lesson is that feedback needs to be controlled, so that it gives useful control at all times, and not in ideal conditions.
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