Risk analysis of Cordova's microgrid from a complex systems viewpoint

Thesis (M.S.) University of Alaska Fairbanks, 2019Cordova is a town of approximately 2,000 people located on the southern coast of Alaska. A power grid for a town this size, with a large seasonal fishing economy, is considered a moderate to large sized microgrid in terms of power produced. Understanding the vulnerabilities and risks of failures in such a grid is important for planning and operations and investigating these characteristics in the context of complex system dynamics is novel. The analysis of Cordova's microgrid is a case study relevant to a large class of microgrid communities that could benefit from this work. Our analysis of this grid began by looking at the distribution of all outages from 2003 - 2017 by size, followed by splitting up outages based on certain characteristics and again looking at outage size distribution based on different characteristics. Following this we correlated the outages with different weather patterns and then with the hourly load demand on the system. After doing these analyses we developed a risk metric to give a single numerical value to the risk of an outage occurring during certain time periods and under certain conditions. We looked at risk in the summer versus the winter due to the summer having a much larger load demand, and we also looked at the risk before and after all cables in the grid were buried underground. This gives us an idea of when/under what circumstances the most outages are likely to occur and allows us to run our model of the system, make changes, and determine if those changes were beneficial to the system or not.RADIANCE gran

Characteristics and Risk of Microgrid Outages from a Complex Systems Point of View

Cordova is a town of approximately 2,000 people located on the southern coast of Alaska. A power grid for a town this size, with a large seasonal fishing economy, is considered a moderate to large sized microgrid in terms of power produced. Understanding the vulnerabilities and risks of failures in such a grid is important for planning and operations. Investigating these characteristics in the context of complex system dynamics is a novel approach. The analysis of Cordova’s microgrid is a case study relevant to a large class of microgrid communities. We analyze the outage data based on size, cause characteristics and load demand on the system and find long time correlations and power laws in the failure size distributions. Finally we apply a risk metric to give a single numerical value to the risk of an outage occurring during certain time periods and under certain conditions

Influence of Heat Treatment on Defect Structures in Single-Crystalline Blade Roots Studied by X-ray Topography and Positron Annihilation Lifetime Spectroscopy

Single-crystalline superalloy CMSX-4 is studied in the as-cast state and after heat treatment, with material being taken from turbine blade castings. The effect of the heat treatment on the defect structure of the root area near the selector/root connection is emphasized. Multiscale analysis is performed to correlate results obtained by X-ray topography and positron annihilation lifetime spectroscopy (PALS). Electron microscopy observations were also carried out to characterize the inhomogeneity in dendritic structure. The X-ray topography was used to compare defects of the misorientation nature, occurring in as-cast and treated states. The type and concentration of defects before and after heat treatment in different root areas were determined using the PALS method, which enables voids, mono-vacancies, and dislocations to be taken into account. In this way, differences in the concentration of defects caused by heat treatment are rationalized

Characteristics and Risk of Microgrid Outages from a Complex Systems Point of View

Cordova is a town of approximately 2,000 people located on the southern coast of Alaska. A power grid for a town this size, with a large seasonal fishing economy, is considered a moderate to large sized microgrid in terms of power produced. Understanding the vulnerabilities and risks of failures in such a grid is important for planning and operations. Investigating these characteristics in the context of complex system dynamics is a novel approach. The analysis of Cordova’s microgrid is a case study relevant to a large class of microgrid communities. We analyze the outage data based on size, cause characteristics and load demand on the system and find long time correlations and power laws in the failure size distributions. Finally we apply a risk metric to give a single numerical value to the risk of an outage occurring during certain time periods and under certain conditions.This proceeding is published as Bowker, Anna, David Newman, Benjamin Carreras, Daisy Huang, Ian Dobson, and Clay Koplin. "Characteristics and Risk of Microgrid Outages from a Complex Systems Point of View." In Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (2021): 3340-3349. http://hdl.handle.net/10125/71021. Posted with permission.</p