FUNDAMENTALS OF POWER FLOW AND POWER LIMITS

contingencies, e.g., loss of a transmission line, loss of a generator, etc. In the past, the bus
impedance matrix also found extensive use in power flow and stability calculations.
The bus impedance matrix can be obtained by a direct inversion of the bus admittance matrix.
For example, from equation (1.62), one can obtain

Y 1I

(1.77)

ZI

where Z is the bus impedance matrix.

The direct inversion is not, however, practical when dealing with large systems typically
containing several hundred and frequently well over a thousand buses. A direct inversion can be
avoided by expressing the admittance matrix as a product of two triangular (lower and upper)
matrices and utilizing a process called backward and forward substitution. The bus admittance
matrix is extremely sparse. In a typical power system a particular bus is connected, on an
average, to three other buses and rarely to more than four, so that a typical row or column of the
bus admittance matrix has four non-zero elements. By optimally re-ordering the rows and
columns before factoring, sparsity can be maintained in the resulting triangular matrices. Since
only the non-zero elements need be stored and used in the computation, great savings in
computer time and storage can, therefore, be realized. Various schemes for optimally ordered
triangular factorization are available.
In contrast, the bus impedance matrix is generally full, i.e., there are very few zero elements in
the matrix. If, however, only a small number of elements are required in a particular study, these
can be selectively calculated from the bus admittance matrix using the above technique, thereby
avoiding the necessity to handle the complete matrix.
For small and medium sized systems it can be more convenient to build the bus impedance
matrix directly from network and system parameters. Starting with one bus selected arbitrarily,
the building of the bus impedance matrix proceeds by adding the remaining buses and lines, one
at a time, and applying one of the three basic procedures as new buses and lines are added. Also,
once the bus impedance matrix of the original network has been formed, any modification to it
following a change in the network (line tripping, line closing, etc.) can be easily and efficiently
performed by applying these procedures. These procedures will now be described.
(i) Adding a new bus to the network
Consider a new bus, numbered n+1, being added to bus i of the network of n buses as shown in
Figure 1.19.

Fig. 1.19 Illustration of the addition of a new bus to an existing network.

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