Distribution Network Reconfiguration for Voltage Sag Improvement using Particle Swarm Optimization

Nowadays, due to increasing usage of sensitive loads, power quality in power grids is becoming more and more important. On the other hand, distribution networks have high losses due to high R/X ratio. Network reconfiguration is proposed as a tool that is changing power quality of the network in addition to power losses. In this paper, the effectiveness of network reconfiguration is evaluated on improvement of voltage sag. 1ph-to-ground fault is applied for modelling of voltage sag. IEEE Standard 69-bus distribution network is utilized as case study and particle swarm optimization algorithm for finding the optimum configuration. Results show that network reconfiguration is capable of improving voltage sag in addition to the improvement of power losses. This improvement leads to reduction of outages in sensitive loads during the occurrence of network faults. In addition, sensitivity analysis on the optimum configuration is performed considering the switching and losses cost