Three-Phase Load Flow for Unbalanced Systems.

Traditionally, transmission systems are assumed to be balanced in power system analysis. A single phase positive sequence circuit is used in transmission system load flow analysis to simplify the study. However, when untransposed transmission lines are used in a power system due to economic considerations, space limitation; or when large unbalanced load is on the system; or when an unbalance contingency occurs on the system, this assumption may not hold true. The unbalance condition in some isolated systems are so precarious that disaster can result. One such incident occurred on a generator unit of the third nuclear power plant of Taipower in 1985. In that particular case, the turbine blades were broken and a spark ignited the liquid hydrogen when the blade vibration resonated with the 120.5 Hz rotor current. One cause of this rotor current generation is system unbalance. The unbalanced three-phase load flow program is needed in today's power system analysis. An advanced three-phase unbalanced transmission load flow program, capable of locating the unbalanced problem of large electric network systems, was proposed to be developed and tested in this research. Features of this program include simultaneous power flow of multiple voltage levels on an individual phase basis; PV bus generator, cogenerator, transformer simulation, and load modeling. It is found that delta-grounded wye step-up transformer reduces the convergence speed greatly. When too many delta-grounded wye step-up transformers exist in a large scale system and a quick approximate result of the unbalance conditions is needed, these step-up transformers can be substituted by grounded-wye to grounded-wye type transformers. This is tested on a Taipower system case which included 345KV, 161KV and 69KV feeders, network transformers, 34 PV bus generators and 188 three-phase buses. Impending unbalance problems in Taipower system were located. When not too many delta-grounded wye type transformers are in the system, as in another 345KV case with 9 delta-grounded wye type step-up transformers, the three-phase unbalanced transmission load flow analysis system would provide transmission system engineers with the capability to study actual system conditions that cannot be simulated by using existing analysis packages.