Power Oscillation Damping Improvement using an Iterative Fault-tolerant Wide-area Control Approach

The effectiveness of using both local and remote (wide-area) feedback signals for power oscillation damping (POD) controllers is first demonstrated. The challenge is then to guarantee a minimum level of dynamic performance with only the local signals following a sudden loss of remote signals. A case study on the Nordic equivalent system is presented to show that the closed-loop response could deteriorate if the remote signals are lost. A fault-tolerant control (FTC) design methodology is presented to solve this problem and ensure an acceptable performance level even in case of loss of remote signals. The FTC design methodology is based on simultaneous regional pole-placement for normal and loss of (remote) signals conditions. First the problem is solved non-iteratively using a Linear Matrix Inequality (LMI) approximation and then it is shown that, although this procedure is linear and easy to implement, it has a drawback: the value of one of the control matrices is fixed before calculating the others. An iterative procedure is presented instead to ameliorate this problem and potentially improve the damping of the system. Case studies on the Nordic equivalent system confirm that the proposed iterative fault tolerant controller (FTCit) is able to improve performance against the non-iterative fault tolerant controller (FTC) and produce acceptable performance in case of loss of the remote signals while the response with a CC is unacceptable if a fault occurs.