Improved power flow robustness for personal computers

Mine electrical power flow solutions are often obtained using personal computers. Because of the limited precision used by the compilers on these machines, power flow solution procedures may diverge or possibly oscillate until the iteration limit is reached, even though an operable solution exists. A simple method is provided for creating virtually extended-precision calculations in both full Newton-Raphson and decoupled power flow algorithms without the attendant slowdown associated with full double-precision codes. Numerical results give a strong indication that the XB and BX decoupled algorithms with a successive iteration strategy (vis-a-vis the classical iteration strategy) and virtual extended precision may perform well on mine electrical power flow problems