Assesment of soft error sensitivity of power flow analysis

Abstract

Today's power systems are large and interconnected to each other with many buses, lines, loads, and generators. Even the solution of a single snapshot of the system for specific conditions requires the solution of systems of equations with large sizes. Thus, to obtain the results in a reasonable time for large problems like electrical power flow simulations, modern large computational environments should be employed. However, because of the increasing number of components in the modern computational environment, the possibility of soft errors also increases. Soft errors can be defined as failures arising from several fluctuations due to x-rays, cosmic particle effects, etc. These types of errors usually appear at any time of computation as a bit-flip in any floating-point operations. In this paper, we will investigate the soft-error effects on large-scale power flow simulations. Generally, power flow calculations are performed by using Newton Raphson Method. The system is modeled by nonlinear equations and the solution process requires a linear solver is employed to take the inverse of the Jacobian matrix at each iteration. In this study, the soft-error sensitivity of the numerical methods used in load flow was examined, and the problems that may be encountered were revealed.