NPP-Smart Grid Mutual Safety and Cyber Security Assurance

The smart grid (SG) is a movement to bring the electrical power grid up to date so it can meet current and future requirements to fit customer needs. Disturbances in SG operation can originate from natural disasters, failures, human factors, terrorism, and so on. Outages and faults will cause serious problems and failures in the interconnected power systems, propagating into critical infrastructures such as nuclear industries, telecommunication systems, etc. Nuclear power plants (NPP) are an intrinsic part of the future smart grid. Therefore, it is of high priority to consider SG safety, mutual influence between NPP and SG, forecast possible accidents and failures of this interaction, and consider the strategies to avoid them.

A Novel Fuzzy Logic Based Load Frequency Control for Multi-Area Interconnected Power Systems

This study focuses on designing an effective intelligent control method to stabilize the net frequency against load variations in multi-control-area interconnected power systems. Conventional controllers (e.g. Integral, PI, and PID) achieve only poor control performance with high overshoots and long settling times. They could be replaced with intelligent regulators that can update controller parameters for better control quality. The control strategy is based on fuzzy logic, which is one of the most effective intelligent strategies and can be a perfect substitute for such conventional controllers when dealing with network frequency stability problems. This paper proposes a kind of fuzzy logic controller based on the PID principle with a 49-rule set suitable to completely solve the problem of load frequency control in a two-area thermal power system. Such a novel PID-like fuzzy logic controller with modified scaling factors can be applied in various practical scenarios of an interconnected power system, namely varying load change conditions, changing system parameters in the range of ±50%, and considering Governor Dead-Band (GDB) along with Generation Rate Constraint (GRC) nonlinearities and time delay. Through the simulation results implemented in Matlab/Simulink software, this study demonstrates the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed fuzzy logic controller over several counterparts in dealing with the load-frequency control of a practical interconnected power system considering the aforesaid conditions.