Comparison between Voltage Sag Simulation Methodologies in Distribution Systems

Voltage Sags are random occurrence events in distribution networks and, due to the difficulty in providing measurement equipment at many places, capturing associated parameters become a hard task. Besides being random, they are phenomena of low frequency of occurrence within a small time window and cause severe impacts in sensitive loads. In this scenario, fault simulation methodologies such as State Enumeration and Monte Carlo Simulation come to be interesting to estimate the behavior of Voltage Sags. The challenge is to find an optimal pair of values for fault location and fault impedance discretization in State Enumeration Method, and the minimum emulation horizon to be considered for Monte Carlo Simulation. Thus, this paper compares the voltage sags impact estimated by both short circuit simulation methodologies in distribution systems. An IEEE 34 bus modified test feeder was used to assess the behavior of these methodologies. The algorithms were implemented in MATLAB®registered and the fault simulation in DistriView®registered.