Health-Focused Optimal Power Flow

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel Health-Focused Optimal Power Flow (HF-OPF) that incorporates equipment health indices into operational constraints, improving reliability and cost-efficiency in microgrid management.

Contribution

It develops a new HF-OPF model that integrates health condition indices derived from FEM simulations, addressing the impact of faults on operational feasibility and costs.

Findings

Faults significantly increase generation costs.

Health condition inflicts high costs and can cause infeasibility.

Inflection points indicate severe fault effects.

Abstract

In this paper, we propose a novel Health-Focused Optimal Power Flow (HF-OPF) to take into account the equipment health in operational and physical constraints. The health condition index is estimated based on the possible fault characteristics for generators and batteries. The paper addresses the need for understanding the relationship between health condition index and the operational constraints in OPF problems. Such a relationship is established through Finite Element Method (FEM)-based simulations. The simulations for generator and battery faults indicate the presence of an inflection point after which effect of fault becomes severe. A microgrid system is used to illustrate the performance of the proposed HF-OPF. The results show that health condition inflicts high cost of generation and can lead to infeasibility even with less critical faults.