The governor is an important component of a hydro power plant. It actuates the guide vanes that regulate the water input to the turbine that controls the turbine power and speed. laboratory studies have given important information about the model characteristics and performance. This work concerns laboratory studies with focus on the characteristics of the Francis turbine model. Appropriate representations of the hydraulic turbine, driven by a Francis turbine and conduit system were developed in various models of varying degrees of details. The laboratory model considered in this study is a test rig set in the Fluid Mechanics laboratory at Al-Azhar University, representing a Francis turbine hydro power plant model. Development and improvement of the measurements on the test rig have been done using sensors instead of manual parameters measurements. A simulation model for the Francis turbine is created by MATLAB simulation software. The governor system is modeled using PID controller. The dynamic response of governing system to load disturbances on the turbine is studied. In addition, different tuning designs for PID governor are studied. The comparison between linearized ideal and experimental model are presented. By applying MATLAB simulation, the result shows that the best output is obtained when the change in speed will stabilize and using the value of K-P = 50, K-I = 45 and K-D = 10. (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier Ltd.