An Approximate Power Flow for Distribution Systems

Power flow calculation is the most used procedure in electrical power systems. Generally, most of optimization problems in electric power systems need a steady state analysis to evaluate the objective function. Especially, those optimization problems that make use of artificial intelligence techniques, where, due to the high number of iterations, the power flow calculation has a crucial role. In these cases, the method used for solving the power flow must be fast and accurate at the same time. This paper presents an approximate power flow solution method to solve distribution systems. The proposed method is based on current mismatch equations. The system of obtained equations cannot be presented as a set of linear complex equations. So, a simplification is introduced in this paper in order to express the system by a set of linear complex equations instead of a double set of linear real equations. Regarding the topology of the network, the proposed method is valid for both radial and mesh distribution systems. Finally, so as to demonstrate the validity and the effectiveness of the proposed method, a set of test distribution systems obtained from the technical literature have been used to test it.