One Hour Ahead Computation of Large-Scale Electric Power Network Transport Capability

Cornell University, Ithaca NY

Investigators

Abstract

This award is made under the Exploratory Research on Engineering the Transport Industries (ETI) program solicitation. This research involves the development of a scalable special-purpose hybrid computing architecture comprising fine-grained parallel analog processing and digital control and reconfigurability to accelerate the computation of large-scale electric power network transfer capacity. The research in this one-year exploratory program will proceed concurrently along three lines. First, the core analog computational units needed to solve the steady-state power-flow problem will be designed, simulated, fabricated, and tested experimentally to determine their potential accuracy and computational throughput. Second, the parallel analog solution method will be developped and refined through simulation. Third, work on a scalable architecture will be initiated. The architecture should support digital reconfigurability as well as the control, communications, and data storage needed for the solution of large-scale network problems. If this research is successful, it could result eventually in the development of a specialized chip set or an accelerator board that would interface with an engineering workstation and could perform a near real-time solution of the steady-state power-flow equations. Such an accelerator board would be something like the specialized graphics cards that are widely for used for accelerating compute-intensive computer graphics tasks.