Power System Damping Control via Current Injections from Distributed Energy Storage.
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For electric utilities, the ability to prevent or minimize lightning damage on personnel and power systems is of great importance. Therefore, the Swedish State Power Board, has been using data since 1983 from a nationwide lightning location system (LLS) for accurately locating lightning ground strikes. Lightning data is distributed and presented on color graphic displays at regional power network control centers as well as at the national power system control center for optimal data use. The main objectives for use of LLS data are: supervising the power system for optimal and safe use of the transmission and generating capacity during periods of thunderstorms; warning service to maintenance and service crews at power line and substations to end operations hazardous when lightning; rapid positioning of emergency crews to locate network damage at areas of detected lightning; and post analysis of power outages and transmission faults in relation to lightning, using archived lightning data for determination of appropriate design and insulation levels of equipment. Staff have found LLS data useful and economically justified since the availability of power system has increased as well as level of personnel safety.
The CRADA between NETL and Derp Tech aims to evaluate potential for early adoption of novel utilityscale advanced power control systems in distributed generation systems. The goal is to enable the grid to add significant hybrid sources, including hybrid power and thermal/electric storage systems, for flexible and adaptive islanding microgrid capabilities. Controls research conducted using the Hybrid Performance Project facility (Hyper) has illustrated the potential for fuel cell turbine hybrid power systems to deal with load transients and offdesign operation. DERP Tech is involved in the design and deployment of commercial solutions for adding microgrids and DG (hybrid combinations for Utility marketplace) to the grid. The information gained from DERP’s sample cases will enable NETL to quantify its control strategies for real world scenarios and applications.
Novel power system control and new utility devices need to be tested before their actual deployment to the power grid. To assist with such a testing need, real-time digital emulators such as RTDS and Opal-RT can be used to connect to the physical world and form a hardware in the loop (HIL) emulation. However, due to the limitations of today's computational resources, the accuracy and fidelity suffer from different levels of model reductions in purely digital simulations. CURENT has developed a reconfigurable electric grid hardware testbed (HTB) to overcome the limitations of digital emulators. The HTB has been used to develop measurement, control, modeling, and actuation techniques for a national grid with a high penetration of renewables. The power electronic-based system includes emulators for synchronous generators; photovoltaics with grid-interfacing inverter; wind turbines; induction motor loads, ZIP loads, power electronic loads; batteries; ac and dc transmission lines; short circuit faults and grid relay protection; and a multiterminal HVDC overlay including power electronics interfaces. The system contains real elements of power flow, measurement, communication, protection, and control that mimic what would be seen in an actual electric grid. This paper presents an overview of the HTB and several scenarios that have been run to determine control and actions needed for the future power grid.
Power electronics is becoming ubiquitous in power systems because the rapid growth of variable renewable generation such as wind and solar, responsive load, electric vehicles, energy storage, as well as DC transmission. As a result, a high percentage of electricity will be generated, transmitted or consumed by power electronics in the future power system. Such a high penetration of power electronics is changing power system operation landscapes and dynamic characteristics. Two major kinds of impact are reduced system mechanical inertia by inverter-based resources displacing conventional generation and active participation of many distributed energy resources through inverters. This has caused significant reliability challenges for power system operation. The mitigation approach so far has mostly focused on accommodating power electronics inverters as passive devices or creating synthetic inertias to make inverter-based generation behaving as conventional generators. However, the high-speed control capabilities of power electronics present new opportunities for achieving an optimal performance beyond conventional power systems. A lower-inertia system can be more responsive for improving reliability, and distributed small resources can be more adaptive and scalable for better flexibility and resilience. Power electronic inverters are capable of multiple fast control functions. To fully utilized the ubiquitous power electronics in power systems requires technology advancements in the following areas: data and communications to capture the new dynamic behaviors introduced by power electronics; modeling and simulation to understand the behaviors of power electronics and its interactions with other components in the context of power systems; control and optimization methods for fully utilizing the capabilities of power electronics for a new paradigm of performance beyond the traditional inertia-heavy system; and significant upgrades in power electronics hardware to cater to the new control capabilities. If properly controlled and optimized, power electronics can help transform the power system to be responsive, adaptive, and scalable.
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Here, this paper has delved into the pressing need for intelligent emergency control in large-scale power systems, which are experiencing significant transformations and are operating closer to their limits with more uncertainties. Learning-based control methods are promising and have shown effectiveness for intelligent power system control. However, when they are applied to large-scale power systems, there are multifaceted challenges such as scalability, adaptiveness, and security posed by the complex power system landscape, which demand comprehensive solutions. The paper first proposes and instantiates a convergence framework for integrating power systems physics, machine learning, advanced computing, and grid control to realize intelligent grid control at a large scale. Our developed methods and platform based on the convergence framework have been applied to a large (more than 3000 buses) Texas power system, and tested with 56 000 scenarios. Our work achieved a 26% reduction in load shedding on average and outperformed existing rule-based control in 99.7% of the test scenarios. The results demonstrated the potential of the proposed convergence framework and DRL-based intelligent control for the future grid.
This paper presents an analysis and experimental validation of dispatchable virtual oscillator control (dVOC) for inverter-dominated power systems. dVOC is a promising decentralized control strategy that requires only local measurements to induce grid-forming behavior with programmable droop characteristics. It is dispatchable -- i.e., the inverters can vary their power generation via user-defined power set-points and guarantees strong stability. To verify its feasibility, a testbed comprising multiple dVOC-programmed inverters with transmission line impedances is designed. With an embedded synchronization strategy, the dVOC inverters are capable of dynamic synchronization, black start operation, and transient grid voltage regulation with dynamic load sharing, and real-time-programmable droop characteristics for backward compatibility. All these features are experimentally verified.
The inherent complexity of boundary plasma, characterized by multi-scale and multi-physics challenges, has historically restricted high-fidelity simulations to scientific research due to their intensive computational demands. Consequently, routine applications such as discharge control and scenario development have relied on faster but less accurate empirical methods. This work introduces DivControlNN, a novel machine-learning-based surrogate model designed to address these limitations by enabling quasi-real-time predictions (i.e., ~ 0.2 ms) of boundary and divertor plasma behavior. Trained on over 70,000 2D UEDGE simulations from KSTAR tokamak equilibria, DivControlNN employs latent space mapping to efficiently represent complex divertor plasma states, achieving a computational speed-up of over 10 8 compared to traditional simulations while maintaining a relative error below 20% for key plasma property predictions. During the 2024 KSTAR experimental campaign, a prototype detachment control system powered by DivControlNN successfully demonstrated detachment control on its first attempt, even for a new tungsten divertor configuration and without any fine-tuning. These results highlight the transformative potential of DivControlNN in overcoming diagnostic challenges in future fusion reactors by providing fast, robust, and reliable predictions for advanced integrated control systems.
System undergoing development uses distributed microprocessors to monitor and control photovoltaic power system. Equipment increases life expectancy and reliability of power system and decreases costs. Adapted to vehicular, residential, and commercial solar and nonsolar power systems. Equipment especially desirable in systems with overall power levels above few kilowatts.
Molten mixtures of MgCl2-KCl-NaCl are promising heat transfer fluid (HTF) candidates for the next generation of concentrating solar power systems (Gen3 CSP), because of their low cost, high decomposition temperature, and favorable heat transfer characteristics. However, if the chemistry of the salts is not properly controlled, molten chlorides can cause corrosion of high-temperature metal alloys, such as Inconel (R), in CSP systems. Here we demonstrate a corrosion monitoring system that can be used to monitor the health of the structural alloys over long durations. The monitoring system includes a multielectrode array voltammetry sensor that measures the redox potential of molten MgCl2-KCl-NaCl mixture as well as the presence of corrosion products and impurities. The sensors have been successfully operated in static molten salt environments for long durations, and are capable of detecting corrosion products, such as Cr2+ and Fe2+, quantitatively at low concentrations (i.e., approximately 100 ppm) with less than 4% error.
The Space Station Module Power Management and Distribution (SSM/PMAD) bread-board is a test bed for the development of advanced power system control and automation. Software control in the SSM/PMAD breadboard is through co-operating systems, called Autonomous Agents. Agents can be a mixture of algorithmic software and expert systems. The early SSM/PMAD system was envisioned as being completely autonomous. It soon became apparent, though, that there would always be a need for human intervention, at least as long as a human interacts with the system in any way. In a system designed only for autonomous operation, manual intervention meant taking full control of the whole system, and loosing whatever expertise was in the system. Several methods for allowing humans to interact at an appropriate level of control were developed. This paper examines some of these intermediate modes of autonomy. The least humanly intrusive mode is simple monitoring. The ability to modify future behavior by altering a schedule involves high-level interaction. Modification of operating activities comes next. The coarsest mode of control is individual, unplanned operation of individual Power System components. Each of these levels is integrated into the SSM/PMAD breadboard, with support for the user (such as warnings of the consequences of control decisions) at every level.
Volt-VAR control (VVC) is crucial in active distribution networks for optimizing voltage profiles and minimizing network losses. While traditional deep reinforcement learning (DRL) algorithms exhibit promise for VVC, they often require extensive computational resources to handle such a high-dimensional problem. As a potential solution, quantum reinforcement learning (QRL) algorithms integrate the computational capabilities of quantum computing into the DRL framework. However, existing QRL algorithms struggle with complex VVC problems due to the limitations of current quantum hardware. To bridge this gap, this paper proposes an innovative QRL algorithm featuring an end-to-end architecture that integrates a classical autoencoder, variational quantum circuits (VQCs), and classical post-processing layers. This design efficiently compresses high-dimensional grid states, enabling VQCs to leverage quantum advantages while producing multiple control device outputs tailored for VVC tasks. Numerical studies on three representative distribution systems verify the effectiveness and scalability of the proposed QRL algorithm, and demonstrate its enhanced performance over classical approaches with only approximately 1% of the parameters. Additionally, the robustness of our developed algorithm is validated through noisy quantum environments.
Applications of boiling heat transfer in space can be found in the areas of thermal management, fluid handling and control, power systems, on-orbit storage and supply systems for cryogenic propellants and life support fluids, and for cooling of electronic packages for power systems associated with various instrumentation and control systems. Recent interest in exploration of Mars and other planets, and the concepts of in-situ resource utiliLation on Mars highlights the need to understand the effect of gravity on boiling heat transfer at gravity levels varying from 1>= g/g(sub e) >=10(exp -6). The objective of the proposed work was to develop a mechanistic understanding of nucleate boiling and critical heat flux under low and micro-gravity conditions when the velocity of the imposed flow is small. For pool boiling, the effect of reduced gravity is to stretch both the length scale as well as the time scale for the boiling process. At high flow velocities, the inertia of the liquid determines the time and the length scales and as such the gravitational acceleration plays little role. However, at low velocities and at low gravity levels both liquid inertia and buoyancy are of equal importance. At present, we have little understanding of the interacting roles of gravity and liquid inertia on the nucleate boiling process. Little data that has been reported in the literature does not have much practical value in that it can not serve as a basis for design of heat exchange components to be used in space. Both experimental and complete numerical simulations of the low velocity, low-gravity nucleate boiling process were carried out. A building block type of approach was used in that first the growth and detachment process of a single bubble and flow and heat transfer associated with the sliding motion of the bubble over the heater surface after detachment was studied. Liquid subcooling and flow velocity were varied parametrically. The experiments were conducted at 1 g(sub e), while varying the orientation of surface with respect to the gravity vector. In the laboratory experiments, holographic interferometry was used to obtain data on velocity and temperature fields associated with a bubble prior to, and after detachment and during sliding motion. A test rig for conducting experiments in the KC-135 was developed, but experiments could not be conducted due to the unavailability of the aircraft prior to completion of the project. Numerical simulations modeling the micro and macro regions of the bubble were carried out in three dimensions. The results of the experiments were used to validate analytical/numerical models.
Unique systems, methods, techniques and apparatuses for cloud-based control for power distribution systems are disclosed. One exemplary embodiment is a system comprising a microprocessor-based power management system in operative communication with a plurality of buildings located remotely from the power management system and a plurality of communication interface devices provided at corresponding ones of the plurality of buildings. The power management system is structured to perform a plurality of building unit-specific optimizations, evaluate a net power demand on the electrical power grid, reduce the net power demand on the electrical power grid while minimizing disruption to the resident-defined preference parameters, and transmit to each of the plurality of interface devices the one or more additional control commands corresponding to the specific building at which each interface device is provided.