Dear All I imagine that several of you on this list have been using Matpower as a tool in electric power engineering courses. Therefore, it might be interesting to share experiences in this field.
I have tried to use Matpower in a cours that ended in June and will continue to use Matpower in courses during this fall. The courses, in which I'm going to use Matpower, are mainly two project cources on BSc level where the students gets an assignment to design the low- and medium voltage networks (grids) for a geographically limited area. Whats makes Matpower a good tool for those courses are that it works well for MV calculations but not for LV calculations. This is perfect because the students are intended to do the LV calculations by hand (mainly calculation of loop impedance). At medium voltage level, Matpower is used to calculate three phase short circuit currents, voltage variations et cetera. My experiences this far are as follows: * Matpower has a strong focus on transmission networks and in order to be used for calculations in MV network it might need som customization, e.g. some losses and loads can be <5 kW/kVAr and will be shown as "0.00" in the output. * The regular input format is a little bit to complicated for my cources becuase the focus is on design issues rather than pu calculations. Therefore, I have created a special m-file that converts data given by rating plates et cetera into pu. I'm going to update this during the summer and maybe send it out to this list in early fall (if someone is interested). * The special input-file I have used includes the possibility to list geographical coordinates for lines and busses. By adding this information, line lengths are calculated and line data can be given in resistance, reactace and capacitance per meter. Further on, the coordinates are used together with a background map to create simple network maps using the ordinary plot command. This was my experiences in short. What are your experiences and have you created any m-files to customize Matpower for your courses? Best Regards David Söderberg David Söderberg Network analyst Vattenfall Eldistribution AB SE-461 88 Trollhättan Visit: Österlånggatan 60 Phone + 46 520 888 44 Mobile + 46 70 330 66 97 [email protected] www.vattenfall.com David Söderberg Teacher, Electric Power Engineering Högskolan Väst / University West SE-461 86 Trollhättan [email protected] www.hv.se/en
