OPTIMAL NETWORK RECONFIGURATION OF DISTRIBUTION SYSTEMS FOR IMPROVING THE PERFORMANCE IN TERM OF POWER QUALITY USING BAT ALGORITHM

Electrical

Abstract

Power quality is considered as one of the most important issue in power distribution systems. Voltage sag is considered as one of the most common power quality problems. It may cause sensitive equipment to malfunction and process interruption. In this work a method of optimal network reconfiguration is proposed to mitigate voltage sag problem in power distribution networks. It is applied to a distribution network in a specified period (usually one year) to minimize the number of propagated voltage sags (Nsag) index. To find the optimal reconfigured network, Bat algorithm (BA) as optimization technique is used. To validate the proposed method, a practical distribution system (section of Malaysian grid) is used. The simulation results show that it is effective to apply the proposed technique in mitigating voltage sag problem in practical power distribution systems