Multi-Area Thévenin Equivalent Based Power Flow Techniques

This thesis explores the possibility of applying the existing Multi-Area Thévenin Equivalent (MATE) algorithm to the power flow problem. Various theoretical considerations/difficulties of handling link connections in power flow are discussed. The current equation power flow program is examined in hopes of aiding link decoupling by taking advantage of the current equation’s inherent symmetrical links. However, implementation and testing of the current equation program indicated contrary results to recently published material on current equation programs. In an attempt to make MATE viable for power flow, one of MATE’s bottlenecks was examined, the link matrix. It was found that the problem could be alleviated by using a multi-level approach. This approach would allow link computation to be distributed across the subsystems and levels. An existing multi-level MATE algorithm has already been proposed but was implemented for only two levels. This thesis proposes a massively parallel algorithm for a general number of levels. The distribution of the link matrix allows for mass parallelization of the system matrix into very small subsystems. A flop analysis of the proposed multi-level MATE algorithm reveals that the majority of the computation is spent performing independent small matrix multiplication operations