Smart grid resilience
Funding: Office of Public Safety and Homeland Security of the City of Houston
Students: Min Ouyang Ph.D. and Akwasi F. Mensah
The smart grid uses a unique digital platform for fast and reliable sensing, measurement, communication, computation, control, protection, visualization, and maintenance of the entire transmission and distribution set of systems. It is expected to not only alert about the potential adverse effects of disruptive events, but also to maintain a high functionality level following disruptions or resilience. This project focuses on the resilience analysis of the future smart grid under different hazard types. According to the system performance response after a disruptive event in Figure 1, the smart grid resilience can be explored at three stages: (1) The first stage ranges from the normal operating state to the onset of initial failure, which can reflect the system’s resistant capacity (the ability of a system to prevent initial failures or reduce their magnitude); (2) The second stage is the damage propagation process after the initial failure, which is influenced by the system’s absorptive capacity (the degree to which a system can absorb the impact of system initial failures and minimize consequences by itself); (3) The third stage is the recovery process during which external resources are allocated to restore the system, which is affected by the recovery capacity (the ability of a system to be easily repaired). For each stage, practical parameters can be extracted to characterize resilience features and then together determine the resilience metrics under different hazard types. Based on these metrics, the effects of different resilience improvement measures can be quantified and provide insight and direction for efficient implementation of the smart grid.
Project:
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