A New Voltage Sensitivity Analysis Method for Medium-Voltage Distribution Systems Incorporating Power Losses Impact

Abstract

—In this paper, a novel voltage sensitivity analysis method is proposed. It presents a complementary formulation of the direct sensitivity analysis approach which has been previously developed based on the topological structure of the network. The proposed method named improved direct sensitivity analysis (IDSA) incorporates variations of power losses in the system branches due to the nodal power changes and their eventual impacts on the node voltages. Effectiveness of the IDSA in voltage estimation is investigated and compared with the voltage results obtained by the direct, Jacobian-based, as well as the perturb-and-observe sensitivity analysis methods. To this end, firstly, the introduced sensitivity analysis methods are tested when active or reactive power is changed at the selected nodes of the studied test systems. Accuracy of voltage responses obtained by each of the considered sensitivity analysis methods is evaluated with respect to the exact voltage value obtained from the load flow study. Moreover, performance of the introduced sensitivity analysis methods is examined when they are separately embedded in a multi-step voltage control algorithm which manages active and reactive powers of distributed generation units in order to keep the system voltages within the permitted voltage limits. Simulation results confirm that when the power losses impact is considerable, the IDSA outperforms the direct, perturb-and-observe, and Jacobian-based sensitivity analysis methods in terms of accuracy of the voltage estimation.