Circulating MW and Mvar flows in large systems

Circulating power flows are possible in power systems and can lead to unnecessary power losses and voltage drops in the transmission system. The most common example is circulating Mvars caused by transformers with unbalanced tap ratios. This paper presents an algorithm to detect circulating real and reactive flows in a power system and also provides a metric to rank the severity of these circulating flows. Examples and causes of circulating flows are presented from large North American cases. The visualization of circulating flows is discussed, as well as the use of circulating flow information for bad data detection.

[1]  Yonghong Chen,et al.  Fast Algorithms for Detecting Circular VAR Flows in Large Power-Flow Models , 2008, Proceedings of the 41st Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS 2008).

[2]  E.T. Jauch.  Circulating current paralleling failures— conditions & consequences , 2008, 2008 IEEE Power and Energy Society General Meeting - Conversion and Delivery of Electrical Energy in the 21st Century.

[3]  Ronald L. Rivest,et al.  Introduction to Algorithms , 1990 .

[4]  Robert E. Tarjan,et al.  Depth-First Search and Linear Graph Algorithms , 1972, SIAM J. Comput..

[5]  Thomas H. Cormen,et al.  Introduction to algorithms [2nd ed.] , 2001 .