Computation Method to Improve Three-phase Voltage Imbalance by Exchange of Single-phase Load Connection

Three-phase voltage imbalance occurs by variety of connecting points of single-phase loads. In order to improve three-phase voltage imbalance, connecting points of single-phases loads are exchanged. System planner has to decide how to exchange connection of single-phase loads with the minimum planning cost in order to improve three-phase voltage imbalance. However, since there are many patterns of connection for single-phase loads, it is not easy to determine the optimal connection pattern for single-phase loads with the minimum planning cost under the constraint for improving voltage imbalance. In this paper, authors propose a computational method to support the planner's decision of single-phase loads connection systematically. The proposed method, which is based on effective enumeration algorithm, can obtain the optimal single-phase loads connection pattern, which satisfies with constraint of voltage balance and has the minimum total number of single-phase loads exchanged from previous single-phase loads connection. In the proposed method, three-phase iterative load flow calculation is applied to calculate rate of three-phase voltage imbalance. Three-phase iterative load flow calculation has two simple procedures: (Procedurel) addition of load currents from terminal node of feeder to root one, and (Procedure2) subtraction of voltage drop from root node of feeder to terminal one. In order to check the validity of the proposed method, numerical results are shown for a distribution system model with DG.