This award supports Professor Anjan Bose and a graduate student of Arizona State University to collaborate in electrical engineering research with Professor Edmund Handschin and his research team at the University of Dortmund, Germany. The subject of their collaboration is the dynamic security analysis of electric power systems. Both groups are actively involved in research in this important new area of electric power engineering, but they bring different strengths and different research approaches to the problem. For example, in the area of parallel processing, the Arizona group is concentrating on finding parallel algorithms that will operate on available multiprocessors, while the German group is seeking the best parallel architecture to solve the dynamic equations. Both are involved in the development of worst case contingency screening tools for power system control centers. In this area, the Arizona group has concentrated on faster, though less accurate, analytical methods while the German group is developing expert systems that are more accurate than analytical methods but more limited in other ways. A major objective of the collaboration is to find a balance between these approaches that will optimize dynamic analysis. The continual on-line assessment of security of the large interconnected power transmission and generation grid is a complex problem of great importance to North America and Western Europe, both of which have suffered regional blackouts that have had serious economic consequences. The security of the electric power network lies in its ability to withstand unexpected disturbances or contingencies. Yet current state of the art assumes stable operation of the system during any disturbance, because calculations required for realistic modeling of a dynamic, fluctuating operation cannot be done fast enough for on-line operation. The ongoing U.S.-German research assisted by this award focuses on solving this dynamic security analysis problem.
