BACTERIAL FORAGING ALGORITHM BASED TUNING OF ON-LOAD TAP CHANGING TRANSFORMER FOR VOLTAGE REGULATION IN POWER TRANSMISSION NETWORK

ABSTRACT

The control of voltage level has been identified as one of the most important operational needs for efficient and reliable operation of power system equipment. Due to the fact that both the utility and customer equipment are designed to operate at certain voltage ratings. Prolonged operation of the equipment at voltages outside the allowable range could adversely affect their performance and may cause forced outages. Therefore, voltage at terminals of all equipment in the system has to be kept within acceptable limits. This dissertation presents the use of Bacterial Foraging Algorithm (BFA) based tuning of on-load tap changer (OLTC) also known as under load tap changer (ULTC) transformer for voltage regulation in power transmission network with the intent of minimizing bus voltage deviation and reduction of transformer tap changing operation. A standard IEEE C57.131 2012 requirements for tap-changer control (0.85-1.15p.u) was adopted for this work and the simulation was carried out in MATLAB 2016 platform using power system analysis toolbox (PSAT), the results obtained when applied on the standard IEEE 14-bus test network, the BFA has demonstrated its superiority over the conventional method and the ABC algorithm in terms of reduction in Bus voltage deviation by 0.25% and 0.12% and reduction in transformer taps changing operation by 0.6% and 0.3% respectively. When applied on the Practical 32- bus Nigerian power system network, the BFA has also shown a superiority over the conventional method and the ABC algorithm in all parameters used, with 4.31%, 0.22% and 0.48% reduction in computational time, bus voltage deviation and transformer tap changing operations respectively.