Approaching the Transient Stability Boundary of a Power System: Theory and Applications

Estimating the stability boundary is a fundamental and challenging problem in transient stability studies. It is known that a proper level set of a Lyapunov function or an energy function can provide an inner approximation of the stability boundary, and the estimation can be expanded by trajectory reversing methods. In this paper, we streamline the theoretical foundation of the expansion methodology, and generalize it by relaxing the request that the initial guess should be a subset of the stability region. We investigate topological characteristics of the expanded boundary, showing how an initial guess can approach the exact stability boundary locally or globally. We apply the theory to transient stability assessment, and propose expansion algorithms to improve the well-known Potential Energy Boundary Surface (PEBS) and Boundary of stability region based Controlling Unstable equilibrium point (BCU) methods. Case studies on the IEEE 39-bus system well verify our results and demonstrate that estimations of the stability boundary and the critical clearing time can be significantly improved with modest computational cost.