Author Description

This dissertation, "Some Aspects of Electric Springs for Smart Grid Applications" by Xiao, Luo,, was obtained from The University of Hong Kong (Pokfulam, Hong Kong) and is being sold pursuant to Creative Commons: Attribution 3.0 Hong Kong License. The content of this dissertation has not been altered in any way. We have altered the formatting in order to facilitate the ease of printing and reading of the dissertation. All rights not granted by the above license are retained by the author. Abstract: Power distribution system is a highly critical infrastructure for modern power grid. In recent years, with the large scale integration of intermittent renewable energy generation which causes instability in the power grid, the power quality problems in distribution system have earned widespread attention. In the beginning of this thesis, the major power quality problems in distribution system have been investigated, and the modern technologies which are used to improve system power quality are analyzed. The survey indicates that in future smart grid, in order to maintain the power system stability, using supervised power consumption to match the power supply via demand side management technologies will become the main trend. A novel concept of smart load technology termed as Electric Spring (ES) is illustrated and evaluated in the rest parts of this thesis. The ES is able to provide dynamic compensation to maintain the system stability. The effectiveness of ES on voltage regulation is successfully demonstrated by hardware experiments. In order to implement ES in complex distribution networks, a software model of ES is designed in Matlab/Simulink for further research. The performance of ES on voltage regulation is firstly evaluated by comparing ES with the STATic COMpensator (STATCOM) which provides traditional centralized voltage control. Two case studies which include an IEEE 13-bus test feeder system and a part of the distribution network in Sha Lo