Woldia University

Woldia Institute of Technology

School of Electrical and Computer Engineering

Power Systems-ECEg4132

Chapter-1
Load Flow Studies

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 Introduction
• Load flow studies are the steady state analysis of an interconnected power
system during normal operations.
• It is an analysis of;
✓ Currents,
✓ Voltages,
✓ Power flows
• Load flow studies are commonly known as power flow studies, which are
essential for analysis and design of power systems.
• The power system is assumed to be operating under balanced conditions and
can be represented by single line diagram.
• The power system network contains hundreds of buses and branches with
impedances specified with per unit in common MBA bases.

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• Load flow studies are necessary for;
✓ Planning
✓ Economic operation
✓ Scheduling and exchange of power between utilities
✓ Transient and Dynamic Stability
✓ Contingency and state estimation

• Results of load flow studies;

✓ Voltage Magnitude
✓ Phase angle
✓ Power flow through transmission line
✓ Line loss
✓ Power injected at all buses

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 Formation of Y-bus Matrix
• In order to formulate admittance or Y-bus matrix, consider the sample 4-bus
power system as shown figure below.

Impedance diagram Admittance diagram

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• The diagonal elements Y matrix is known as Self-admittance or Driving point
admittance which is calculated as:

• Off-diagonal elements of Y matrix is known as Transfer admittance or mutual

admittance which is calculated as:

Where,
𝑌𝑖𝑘 𝑎𝑟𝑒 𝑡ℎ𝑒 𝑒𝑙𝑒𝑚𝑒𝑛𝑡𝑠 𝑜𝑓 𝑌 𝑎𝑚𝑖𝑡𝑎𝑛𝑐𝑒 𝑚𝑎𝑡𝑟𝑖𝑥
𝑉𝑖 are the bus voltages
𝐼𝑖 are the current injected at each node

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 Example
Find out the Y-matrix of the sample power system as shown in figure below.

Data for the system are given in table below.

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 Solution
Note that the line charging admittance is considered in this example. One should represent
each line as pi equivalent. First compute the total charging admittance at each bus.

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 Network Model formulation
• It is the way of representing a single line diagram with its equivalent admittance
or impedance diagram to develop network equation of the system.
• To arrive network model
a. Short line represented by impedance (ignore resistance)
b. long lines by nominal 𝜋 model

b). Impedance diagram of the power network

a)Single-line diagram of a simple power network

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c). Equivalent admittance diagram of the impedance

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 Bus Loading Equations
Consider the i-th bus of power system below.

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 Load flow Problem
• The starting point of a load flow problem is a single line diagram of the power
system, from which input data for analysis can be obtained. Input data consist
of bus data, transmission line data and transformer data.

• In a power system each node or buses are associated with 4 quantities such as:
▪ Magnitude of Voltage V
▪Phase angle of Voltage δ
▪Active Power P
▪Reactive Power Q

• In load flow problem two out of those quantity are specified and remaining 2
are required to be determined through the solution of equation.

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 Bus Classification

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• Slack bus: also known as swing bus and taken as reference, where the
magnitude voltage and phase angle of the system are specified. This bus
provide the additional real and reactive power to supply the transmission
losses, since these are unknown until the final solution is obtained.
• Load bus: also known as PQ bus. At these buses the real and reactive
powers are specified. The magnitude and phase angle of the bus voltage are
unknown until the final solution is obtained.
• Voltage controlled bus: also known as generator bus or regulated buses or P-
|V| buses. At these buses, the real power and voltage magnitude are specified.
The phase angle of voltages and reactive power are unknown until the final
solution is obtained. The limits on the value of reactive power are also
specified.
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 Methods for solving the load flow problem

• The power flow equations are nonlinear, thus can not be solved analytically.
• A numerical iterative algorithm is required to solve such questions.
• There are 4 methods of solving the load flow problem
I. The Gauss Seidel Method
II. Newton Rapson Method
III. Decoupled Method
IV. Fast Decoupled Method

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 Gauss Seidel Method
• It is an iterative algorithm for solving a set of nonlinear algebraic equations.
A power system is considered consists of a number of buses.
• Consider 4 bus power system network which bus 1 is given as slack bus i.e.,
the voltage magnitude and its phase angle is known given below:

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In Gauss seidal method, the new calculated voltage at (p+1) i.e.
𝑉𝑖 (𝑝+1) immediately replace 𝑉𝑖 (𝑝) and used in the solution of subsequent
equations. Therefore, the above equations can be written in the iterative form as
flows;

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 Calculation of net injected Power

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 Computation of Line flows and Line Losses

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 Algorithm for Gauss Seidal Method
Step 1: Initial computation;
If load profile known at each bus (i.e. 𝑃𝑙𝑖 and 𝑄𝑙𝑖 are known) allocate
𝑃𝑔𝑖 𝑎𝑛𝑑 𝑄𝑔𝑖 at all generating units, i.e. the net injected power (𝑃𝑖 + 𝑗𝑄𝑖 ) at all
buses are known other than slack bus.
Step 2: Formulate Y bus matrix
With the line and shunt admittance data form Y bus matrix.
Step 3: Iterative computation of bus voltage
A set of initial voltage values are assumed.
Since in power system the voltage variation is not wide, it is usually practice to
use a flat voltage.
Iterative computation is contained until the voltage variation is less than a certain
tolerance for all bus voltages i.e.

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Step 4: Computation of Slack Bus Power
Slack bus power can be computed using the equation:

Step 5: Computation of line flow

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 Example-Gauss Seidel method
Fig below shows single diagram of a simple three bus system. Data for the system are
given below.

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 Solution

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 Exercise
Solve the previous example by considering bus 2 is generator bus.

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 Newton Rapson Method
• The Newton-Raphson method is a powerful method of solving non-linear
algebraic equations. It works faster and is sure to converge in most cases as
Guass-Seidel method.
• Mathematically superior to Guass-Seidel method.
▪ It is an iterative method which approximates the set of non-linear
simultaneous equations to a set of linear equations using Taylor’s series
expansions.
▪ More efficient for large networks.
▪ Number of iterations required for solution is independent of system size
▪ Solving for voltage magnitude and angle, given real and reactive power
injections

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▪ Here load flow analysis using newton Rapson method will be;

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 Algorithm for N-R power flow

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 Example-Newton Rapson method
Consider the three-bus system of Figure below. Each of the three lines has a series impedance of
0.02 + 𝑗0.08 𝑝𝑢 and a total shunt admittance of j0.02pu. The specified quantities at the buses are
given below.

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 Decoupled Load flow Method
• An important characteristics of any practical electric power transmission system
operating in steady state is the strong inter dependence between real powers and
bus voltages angles and between reactive powers and voltage magnitudes. this
interesting property of weak coupling between P-δ and Q-V variables gave the
necessary motivation in developing decoupled load flow(DLF) method.

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 Algorithms for Decoupled load flow method

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 Example-Decoupled Load flow method

The fig below shows a single-line diagram of three-bus power system. The
scheduled generation values, load values and Line impedances are marked in
the diagram in per unit on 100 MVA base and the line charging admittance are
neglected. Find load flow solutions using decoupled load flow method.

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 The End!!!

May God Bless Ethiopia!

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