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A BRANCH-CURRENT-BASED STATE ESTIMATION METHOD FOR DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS ECE765 Project

GERMAN ESCOBAR ZULUAGA ID. 20284730

UNIVERSITY OF WATERLOO FACULTY OF ENGINEERING ELECTRICAL AND COMPUTER ENG. DEP. GRADUATE STUDIES ECE765 DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS ENGINEERING MAGDY SALAMA April 25, 2008

1. INTRODUCTION As a consequence of the deregulation process the operation of the networks has been pushed closer towards its technical limits. The stress on the system is considerably bigger than in the past. The efficient use of all network elements is of prime interest of the network operator because the cost costraints have also become much tigher than in the past. It must be noticed that planning and operation of electric networks are undergoing fundamental and radical changes, including new challenges for the engineering task. One of these challenges is the real time monitoring of distribution systems. State estimation (SE) has become a standar and basic tool in power systems management. However, development of a SE for distribution system is a challenging task. Distribution systems posses characteristics such as radial and weakly meshed configurations, wide ranging resistance and reactance values. Therefore, a practical distribution SE requires unbalanced representation.These properties, which are ill conditioned problems, often make the fast decoupled SE methods less efficient or divergent. From the experience of energy management systems (EMS) a practical SE must possess the ability to handle power, current, and voltage measurements. The conventional bus branch oriented data format is also used for most utilities and a typical SCADA system can provide streaming measurements at update rates of 10-20 Hz, which is a high time-resolution of measurements. In addition to a real time load flow solution, SE also provides function such as bad measurement data detection, modeling error detection, parameter estimation, network topology, meter placement and observability test. The main focus of this paper is to present a computationally efficient SE method that is tailored for monitoring of distribution feeders in real-time. A branch-current-based three-phase SE method is developed. The method can handle radial feeders and is computationally more efficient and more insensitive to line parameters than the conventional node-voltage-based SE methods. This improvement mainly comes from the fact that the branch current formulation decouples the SE problem into three subproblems, one for each phase. Furthermore, a simple rule based feeder network reduction method is proposed in this paper to further improve the computational efficiency of SE without sacrificing accuracy. The minimum data requirements are presented in the fourth section.

2. STATE ESTIMATION

The branch-current-based SE method, like conventional node-voltage-based SE methods, is based on the weighted least square (WLS) approach. An excellent review of the state-of-the-art on SE can be found in [8]. Rather than using the node voltages as the system state, the method uses the branch currents and solves the following WLS problem to obtain an estimate of the system operating point defined by the system state x: () = =1 ( ())2 = [ ()] [ ()] (1)

where wi and hi(x) represent the weight and the measurement function associated with measurement zi, respectively. For the solution of this problem the conventional iterative method is adapted by solving the following normal equations at each iteration to compute the correction xk+l = xk + xk,
[( )] = ( )[ ( )]

(2)

where
() = ()()

(3)

is the gain matrix and H is the Jacobian of the measurement function h(x). One of the main challenges in implementing this approach for SE in distribution feeders is incorporating the unbalanced nature of distribution feeders into the problem. Other challenges are the lack of enough real- time measurements and the fact that most of the available measurements are branch current magnitude measurements which are not usually included in the conventional SE methods [1]. These issues are addressed below. 2.1 Unbalanced three-phase line model At the transmission level certain assumptions have been made for the calculation of transmission line impedance, in order to reduce the complexity of the calculation of line inductance. The two fundamental assumptions are: 1 Balanced three-phase currents 2 Complete transposition of conductors With these two assumptions a simple equation is derived for phase inductance which includes the self inductance and the effect of the mutual inductance with the other two phases. For balanced three-phase system analysis this is a viable method and the one most commonly used in industry for the

determination of impedance values to use in power flow studies of transmission systems. However, a distribution system does not lend itself to either of the two assumptions. Because of the dominance of single-phase loads the assumption of balanced three-phase currents is not justified. Distribution lines are never transposed nor can it be assumed that the conductor configuration is an equilateral triangle. When the two assumptions are thrown out it is necessary to introduce a more sophisticated and accurate method of calculating line impedances. The method presently being used is the application of Carson's equations to a three-phase grounded four wire wye system. [ 6 ] Carson's equations are not derived in total, but it is possible to develop them in form based upon the derivation of inductance. It is required to review the derivation of inductance and then to see that method expanded to a very accurate, though computationally difficult, method of calculating line impedances. Carson's equations allow for the computation of conductor self impedance and the mutual impedances between conductors for any number of conductors above ground. For a three-phase, four wire grounded wye system a simple model is shown in Figure 1. La Va Rb Lb Vb

Ra V
c

L Lg
b c

Lan
b

Rc

Lab

Lc

Fig. 1 Three-Phase, four wire line model For this four wire system, Carson's equations will lead to the development of a 4X4 impedance matrix. This matrix is used to calculate conductor voltage drops as shown in Equation (4) , , = , [ [, ] , , , , , , , , , , [ ] , , ]

(4)

Figure 1 shows a three-phase line section, in which the line constants can be obtained by the method developed by Carson and Lewis [6]. 4X4 matrix, which takes into account the self- and mutual coupling impedance, can be expressed as

, , = , [,

, , , ,

, , , ,

, , , , ]

(5)

In a grounded neutral system: = 0 (6)

By substituting Equation 6 into Equation 4, the 4X4 matrix can be reduced to a 3X3 matrix as shown in Equation 7. , [ ] = [ ] = [, , , , , , , ] [ ] ,

(7)

The relationship between the Carson equation impedances of Equation 4 and the final impedances of Equation 7 is given by: =

(8)

After Kron's reduction is applied, the effects of the netutral or ground wire can be included in this model and the line impedance matrix of an unbalanced three-phase line section can be expressed as , = , + ,
, = [, , , , , , , ] ,

(9)

(10)

If any phase is not to present, the corresponding row and column in this matrix will contain null entries. The relationships between bus voltages and branch currents can be expressed as , , , [, ] = [, ] , [, ] , , , Equation (12) can be written as , = , , (12)

(11)

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