Volume 8, Issue 1

Brushless doubly-fed machines (BDFMs) allow the use of a partially rated inverter and therefore offer reliable, maintenance-free operation at low cost, especially in large power variable speed applications with limited speed ranges such as off-shore wind turbines, pumps etc. However, with a special cage rotor design, the machine has substantial rotor losses, poor efficiency and complicated control being difficult to implement.The BDFM reluctance type, the brushless doubly-fed reluctance machine (BDFRM), can overcome most of the above BDFM deficiencies while retaining all its merits. It has a "cold" reluctance rotor, which makes it more efficient and much easier to model/control than the BDFM.A theoretical study of the BDFRM is very important to gain proper understanding of its unusual operation, the main control features and compromises between optimal performance and the size of the inverter and machine required. This paper will attempt to develop, and provide a comprehensive comparative analysis of, different control strategies for the machine that are suitable for digital implementation.

The operating cost of a radial distribution system may be minimized by reducing the amount of real power and reactive power drawn from the transmission system. Presently, real power is being priced through a market clearing scheme all over North America. Reactive power is an ancillary service and its supply would be priced appropriately in the near future through a clearing market structure. A recent US Federal Energy Regulatory Commission staff report [1] has initiated a discussion on the formulation of a reactive power market. When such a market is designed and operated, large customers (distribution corporations) will have to purchase reactive power along with real power from the transmission corporation through an independent system operator. Envisaging such a prospect, this paper proposes a new method of reconfiguring radial systems considering costs of real and reactive power while maintaining an appropriate voltage profile and level of reliable power supply. The proposed method is tested on sample test systems and reported.

Deregulation of the power industry, increases in consumer demand of electricity and mandates to reduce greenhouse gases has significantly heightened the interest in distributed generation (DG). Typical DG sources include wind turbines, fuel cells, micro gas/diesel turbines, small hydro generators and photovoltaics. Currently most of these generation sources are optimized for local operation and thus the potential of DG that is both dispatchable and cost-effective has yet to be fully realized. One key technical challenge is the development of low-cost communications for remote telemetry and control of individual DG sources. Along with cost, other key communication system requirements are modularity, range and reliability. This paper presents a distributed generation communication system (DGCS) that is based on a wide area network (WAN) and local area network (LAN) topology and utilizes two variants of low-cost radio modems (RM) to satisfy the desired connectivity between the DG sites and a centralized control center. For the LAN, low-cost RMs operating in the industrial, scientific, and medical (ISM) frequency band offers point-to-multipoint scalability to multiple DG sites within a limited range. Integration of the ISM RMs with a cellular RM provides connectivity to a WAN or Internet thus providing long-range access to DG sites from any facility that has internet-access. Given the LAN scalability requirement, an ISM field programmable gate array (FPGA) channel simulator was developed to assess DGCS performance using channel impairments such as free-space path loss, multipath reflections, additive white Gaussian noise (AWGN), multiple access interference, and narrowband interference. This study provides the evaluation of two commercially available ISM radio modems and recommendations are made based on LAN requirements such as cost and performance given difficult channel conditions.

This paper investigates the use of trajectory sensitivity analysis (TSA) technique for assessing the transient stability of a power system at various operating conditions. The effect of placement of a thyristor controlled series compensator (TCSC) as well as the influence of the change in firing angle is also discussed. The TCSC is modeled by a variable capacitor, the value of which changes with the firing angle. The systems studied are the WSCC 3-machine, 9-bus system and IEEE 16 machine 68 bus system. The results using TSA are validated by PSCAD/EMTDC simulation.

The electric power industry in the United States and in other countries is undergoing profound regulatory and operational changes. The underlying rationale behind these transformations is to move once highly monopolized vertically-integrated industry from a centralized operation approach to a competitive one. The emerging competitive markets and an increase in the number of market participants have, in turn, fundamentally changed not only electricity trading patterns but also the structure of the electric power supply chains. This new framework requires new mathematical and engineering models and associated algorithmic tools. Moreover, the availability of fuels for electric power generation is a topic of both economic importance and national security. This paper uses the model developed by Nagurney and Matsypura (2004, 2006) as the foundation for the introduction of explicit fuel suppliers, in the case of nonrenewable and/or renewable fuels, and their optimizing behavior, into a general electric power supply chain network model along with "direct-supply" generation. We derive the optimality conditions for the various decision-makers, including fuel suppliers, power generators, suppliers, as well as the transmission service providers and the consumers at the demand markets. We establish that the governing equilibrium conditions satisfy a finite-dimensional variational inequality problem. We provide qualitative properties of the equilibrium flow pattern; in particular, existence of a solution and uniqueness under suitable assumptions. Finally, we discuss how the equilibrium fuel supply and electric power flow pattern can be computed.

The security of the transmission system is dependent on the relays’ performance after various disturbances. Undesirable relay operation will trip the lines and lead to cascading events. In this paper the operation margin of mho relays is equivalently redefined as function of bus voltages instead of line impedance. The sensitivities of the operation margin to bus voltage and bus power is applied to quantify the vulnerability of transmission system. The contribution of the shunt compensation by SVC is analyzed based on the sensitivities (control factors) of the operation margin to the shunt susceptance. It is found that the control effect of SVC is approximately linear when the mho relay has relative smaller operation margin. In this range the linear model based on the control factors is accurate enough to simulate the control effect. It is also found that the shunt compensations at different locations may yield opposite effect to the operation margin of the mho relays, which can be easily judged by the value of the control factors.

A stochastic multi-objective line security constrained problem is formulated to minimize non-commensurable objectives viz. operating cost, polluting gaseous emission and variance of active power generation and reactive power generation, with explicit recognition of statistical uncertainties in the thermal power generation cost coefficients, gaseous emission coefficients, power demands and hence power generations and bus voltages, which are considered random variables. Specific technique is put forth to convert the stochastic models into their respective deterministic equivalents. Fuzzy set theory has been exploited to evaluate the different objectives that are quantified by defining their membership functions. Security of transmission lines with respect to expected active power flow is considered in the form of fuzzy objective function. The solution set of such formulated problems is non-inferior due to contradictions among the objectives undertaken. The weighting method is used to simulate the trade-off relationship between the conflicting objectives in the non-inferior domain. Generally, the weights are either simulated or searched in the non-inferior domain. In the paper Evolutionary search technique is implemented to search the ‘preferred’ weightage pattern in the non-inferior domain, which corresponds to the ‘best’ compromised solution. Among the non-inferior solutions, the system operator selects the ‘preferred’ optimal operating point that provides maximum satisfaction level of the most under achieved objective in terms of membership function and is termed as fitness function. The validity of the proposed method has been demonstrated on an IEEE system comprising of 11-nodes, 17-lines and 5-generators.