Resilience and vulnerability of power distribution systems: approaches for dynamic features and extreme weather scenarios

• Autor(a) principal: Bessani, Michel
• Data de Publicação: 2018
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da USP
• Texto Completo: http://www.teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/18/18153/tde-11072018-165318/
• topic: Confiabilidade; Critical infrastructures; Infraestruturas críticas; Power distribution systems; Reliability; Resilience; Resiliência; Robustez; Robustness; Sistemas de distribuição de energia; Vulnerabilidade; Vulnerability

Our society is heavily dependent on commodities, as water and electricity, supplied to final users by engineered systems, which are known as critical infrastructures. In such context, the understanding of how such systems handle damaging events is an important aspect and is a current concern of researchers, public agents, and society. How much of performance a system loses due to damages is related to its vulnerability, and the ability to absorb and recover successfully from damages is its resilience. In this study, approaches to assess the vulnerability and resilience of power distribution systems by evaluating dynamic features, as the processes of failure and repair, and system reconfiguration for vulnerability, and the effects of extreme weather scenarios for resilience together with the processes of failure of repair are presented. Such approaches were applied on systems previously presented in the literature, and also on a Brazilian power distribution system. A Monte Carlo simulation was applied to evaluate this systems, models for time-to-failure and time-to-repair under different circumstances were obtained from historical data, and a method to use the models of time-to-failure during the vulnerability analysis was introduced. In addition, an assessment of the impact of reconfiguration capability on vulnerability is also carried out, and a resilience assessment under different climate scenarios has been developed. The time-to-failure and repair models highlighted how external factors modifies the Brazilian system failure and repair dynamics, the use of time-to-failure models during vulnerability analysis showed that the consideration of the failure dynamic of the types of elements give different results, and the time domain allows new analysis\' perspectives. The investigation indicated that the vulnerability reduction due to reconfiguration is affected by the number of switches and also the maximum load capacity of the distribution system feeders. The resilience assessment showed that for structural connectivity, larger distribution networks are less resilient, while for electricity delivery, a set of features, related with the topological and electrical organization of such networks, seems to be associated with the network service resilience, such information is useful for system planning and management. The dynamics evaluated in this study are relevant to vulnerability and resilience of such systems, and also to other critical infrastructures. Moreover, the developed approaches can be applied to other systems, as transportation and water distribution. In future studies, other power distribution systems features, as distributed generation and energy storage, will be considered in both, vulnerability and resilience analysis.