Damping of electromechanical oscillations using power system stabilizers

Includes bibliographical references.This thesis deals with the damping of electromechanical oscillations using Power System Stabilizers (PSS). The thesis focuses on three problems associated with the damping of these oscillations, namely the determination of the optimal locations of the PSS, the determination of the best control structure of the PSS and the design of robust PSS. We develop two new methods for determining the optimal locations of the PSS. These two methods are based on Total Modified Coupling Factors (TMC) and optimization by Simulated Annealing (SA). The TMC is a measure of the damping influence of each machine pair on several power system modes. The TMC incorporates the effect of the performance and the type of excitation system of the generator. The method based on TMC is tested on a nine-bus benchmark network. In the method based on SA, we formulate the PSS placement problem as a discrete nonlinear optimization problem. The objective function corresponds to the damping of the electromechanical modes of the system. In this method, the placement is performed simultaneously for all PSS. Using SA, we obtain a placement scheme which guarantees that the undesired poles can be controlled with finite control energy. As a result of the optimization formulation, the method based on SA is computationally more intensive than the method based on TMC. We demonstrate the method based on SA on two networks namely, a seven-bus network and a 35-bus equivalent of the Eskom network. The problem of determining the control structure for damping of the electromechanical oscillations is composed of three aspects namely, the type of feedback, the type of signal and the type of control