Simulation Of Power Grid Cascading Faults Based On The AC Power-flow Model

Tripping of the transmission lines due to line overload or faults may cause a cascading fault when the large load transfer from the tripping triggers more lines to be tripped, the resulted cascading fault may finally result in a wide-area blackout of the power system. Firstly, in this thesis, a new load-shedding module is introduced in the cascading fault simulation to judge the trend of load-shedding and calculate the accurate load-shedding capacity by using continuation power flow, and hence a new mathematical model for power-grid cascading-fault simulation is established. Secondly, a simulation program of cascading faults using the presented model is developed by using the MATLAB7.0 tool. The simulation results show that the presented model can more accurately reflect the developing process of cascading faults. Finally, the self-organized criticality of the cascading faults and wide-area blackouts is analyzed to validate the presented mathematical model and the developed program.