This paper analyses the application of two fault tolerant control schemes to a hydroelectric model developed in the Matlab and Simulink environments. The proposed fault tolerant controllers are exploited for regulating the speed of the Francis turbine included in the hydraulic system. The nonlinear behaviour of the hydraulic turbine and the inelastic water hammer effects are taken into account in order to develop a high-fidelity simulator of this dynamic plant. The first fault tolerant control solution relies on an adaptive control design, which exploits the recursive identification of a linear parametric time-varying model of the monitored system. The second scheme proposed uses the identification of a fuzzy model that is exploited for the reconstruction of the fault affecting the system under diagnosis. In this way, the fault estimation and its accommodation is possible. Note that these strategies, which are both based on identification approaches, are suggested for enhancing the application of the suggested fault tolerant control methodologies. These characteristics of the study represent key issues when on-line implementations are considered for a viable application of the proposed fault tolerant control schemes. The faults considered in this paper affect the electric servomotor used as a governor, the hydraulic turbine speed sensor, and the hydraulic turbine system, and are imposed both separately and simultaneously. Moreover, the complete drop of the rotational speed sensor is also analysed. Monte-Carlo simulations are also used for analysing the most important issues of the proposed schemes in the presence of parameter variations. Moreover, the performances achieved by means of the proposed solutions are compared to those of a standard PID controller already developed for the considered model. Finally, these strategies serve to highlight the potential application of the proposed control strategies to real hydraulic systems. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.