CONSISTENT AUTOMATION

Electric actuators for hydropower and hydraulic steel structures

Reliable, powerful, robust.

For several decades, AUMA actuators have proved their reliability in automating sluice gates, butterfly valves and gates in weirs, fish ladders, locks, and hydropower plants.

AUMA’s comprehensive portfolio covers torques ranging from 10 Nm to 675 000 Nm offering homogeneous automation schemes throughout the plant: from simple OPEN-CLOSE applications to level control using an integral PID controller.

Discover our comprehensive automation solutions www.auma.com

LIMBERG 3: POWER STATION’S MOUNTAIN ‘CATHEDRAL’ NOW COMPLETE

With the completion of the cavern for Limberg 3 in December last year, Austria’s largest power station construction site in Kaprun has achieved the first milestone. At 43 metres high, the facility’s machine cavern would be large enough to accommodate one or the other church building. Deep inside the mountain, below the Limberg dam, it took the engineers months of blasting work to excavate the amply sized power station cavern. Measuring 25m wide, 63m long and 43m high, the excavated site is located next to the machine room of Limberg 2. While the concrete pouring work is proceeding inside the cavern, the channels for the turbines’ water supply, the horizontal intake conduit and the pressure shaft are being concrete reinforced and armour-plated. Limberg 3 is a pumped-storage power plant with an overall output capacity of 480MW. Like Limberg 2, which went on-line in 2011, it is being constructed completely underground between the two existing reservoirs of Mooserboden and Wasserfallboden (1,672m maximum storage level).

CHINA CELEBRATES 110-YEAR-OLD POWER PLANT

Hydropower plays a central role in China's electricity generation mix with a share of 14.6%. Older plants, such as the Shilongba power plant in the southwestern Chinese province of Yunnan, which went online in May 1912, still play an important role. What makes this hydropower plant so unique is that it is still generating electricity reliably, partly using the original infrastructure. The generator still bears the emblem of ‘J.M. VOITH Heidenheim, 1910’. Originally, the power station played an essential role in the industrialisation of the region, later powering private buildings. Today, after being expanded several times in the past century, the power plant has four sets of machines with a total installed capacity of 7,300 kilowatts.