GW-class turbine unit for China's Baihetan dam completed

CHENGDU - China's million-kilowatt generating unit for the Baihetan hydropower project has seen its last core component, the water distributor, completed.

The distributor weighed more than 870 tonnes and was developed by Dongfang Electric Machinery Co., Ltd. in Southwest China's Sichuan province, a leading Chinese electric machinery maker.

As a key part of controlling the direction and volume of water inflow, the distributor has met high technical targets in terms of vertical gap and end gap of guide vanes and concentricity, the company said.

Based on the successful experience of the construction of large hydropower plants such as the Three Gorges and Xiluodu, Dongfang Electric Machinery has made a series of technological innovations to improve product performance, reliability and expected service life.

Gate leakage has been reduced to a tenth of the normal level to avoid significant losses in efficiency. The 0.05-mm concentricity of the installation was also above top-quality standards, the company said.

On the Jinsha River, an upper section of the Yangtze, the Baihetan dam is the second largest after the Three Gorges project in central Hubei Province in terms of installed capacity.