Engineering topics

McEntee, Catie

Publications and source records attributed to McEntee, Catie.

3 records

DOE OSTI2021

A Zonal Volt/VAR Control Mechanism for High PV Penetration Distribution Systems

This paper presents a zonal Volt/VAR control scheme for regulating voltage in unbalanced 3-phase distribution systems using inverter-based resources (IBR). First, the dependency between nodal voltage changes and IBR reactive power injections is derived via voltage sensitivity studies. Then, a fast-incremental clustering method is used to divide the distribution circuit into weakly-coupled zones based on correlations between nodal voltage sensitivities. The weak-coupling allows the voltage to be regulated independently within each zone using a rule-based voltage controller to dispatch IBR for voltage corrections. Simulation results on actual distribution feeder show that the proposed zone-based Volt/VAR control method maintains system voltages within their operational limits while reducing the runtime of the Volt/VAR controller from tens of second to a couple of milliseconds compared with centralized, optimization-based Volt/VAR control methods.

Alrushoud, Asmaa↗

DOE OSTI2021

Networked HIL Simulation System for Modeling Large-scale Power Systems

This paper presents a networked hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) simulation system for modeling large-scale power systems. Researchers have developed many HIL test systems for power systems in recent years. Those test systems can model both microsecond-level dynamic responses of power electronic systems and millisecond-level transients of transmission and distribution grids. By integrating individual HIL test systems into a network of HIL test systems, we can create large-scale power grid digital twins with flexible structures at required modeling resolution that fits for a wide range of system operating conditions. This will not only significantly reduce the need for field tests when developing new technologies but also greatly shorten the model development cycle. In this paper, we present a networked OPAL-RT based HIL test system for developing transmission-distribution coordinative Volt-VAr regulation technologies as an example to illustrate system setups, communication requirements among different HIL simulation systems, and system connection mechanisms. Impacts of communication delays, information exchange cycles, and computing delays are illustrated. Simulation results show that the performance of a networked HIL test system is satisfactory.

Xie, Fuhong↗

DOE OSTI2020

Development of an Encoding Method on an Co-simulation Platform for Mitigating the Impact of Unreliable Communication

This report presents a hardware-in-the-loop (HIL) based modeling approach for simulating impacts of unreliable communication on the performance of centralized volt-var control and for developing an encoding method to mitigate the impacts. First, an asynchronous real-time HIL simulation platform is introduced to enable multi-rate co-simulation of a distribution system with many inverter-based distributed energy resources (DERs). The distribution system is modeled by milliseconds phasor-based models and the DERs are modeled by micro-seconds power electronic models. Communication connections between a centralized volt-var controller (modeled externally to the HIL testbed) and smart inverters are built by implementing Modbus links and the Long Term Evolution network. On this co-simulation platform, an enhanced, augmented Lagrangian multiplier based encoded data recovery (EALM-EDR) algorithm for mitigating the impact of unreliable communication is developed and validated. Simulation results demonstrate the efficacy of using the HIL-based co-simulation platform as a power grid digital twin for developing algorithms that coordinate a large number of heterogeneous control systems through wired and wireless communication links.

24 POWER TRANSMISSION AND DISTRIBUTION↗