Understanding Power Quality Based FACTS Using Interactive Educational GUI Matlab Package

The electricity is invisible and the complexity of mathematical models deviate the graduate students attention from well understanding the underlying main concepts. Interactive educational power system software has become a fundamental teaching tool because it helps in particular the undergraduate students to assimilate theoretical issues and complex models analysis through flexible graphic visualization of data inputs and the results (Abur et al., 2000), (Milano, F., 2005). From the educational point of view software developed for educational purposes should be flexible and interactive, easy to use and reliable. In particular, software for power system education should contain a user interface not only to allow graduate student to analyse and understand the physical phenomena, but also to improve the existing models and algorithms (Mahdad, B., 2010 ). Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) philosophy was first introduced by Hingorani (Hingorani N. G., and Gyugyi L, 1999) from the Electric power research institute (EPRI) in the USA in 1988, although the power electronic controlled devices had been used in the transmission network for many years before that. The objective of FACTS devices is to bring a system under control and to transmit power as ordered by the control centers, it also allows increasing the usable transmission capacity to its thermal limits. With FACTS devices we can control the phase angle, the voltage magnitude at chosen buses and/or line impedances. The avantages of the graphical user interface tool proposed lie in the quick and the dynamic interpretation of the results and the interactive visual communication between users and computer solution processes. The physical and technical phenomena and data of the power flow, and the impact of different FACTS devices installed in a practical network can be easily understood if the results are displayed in the graphic windows rather than numerical tabular forms (Mahdad, 2010). The application programs in this tool include power flow calculation based NewtonRaphson algorithm, integration and control of different FACTS devices, the economic dispatch based conventional methods and global optimization methods like Parallel Genetic Algorithm (PGA), and Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO). In the literature many educational Graphical tools for power system study and analysis developed for the purpose of the power system education and training (Milano et al., 2005).