Investigation into transient stability of a nuclear power plant using DIgSILENT

The current electricity crisis, coupled with the lack of generation, has led to a major focus on continuity of supply. The Western Cape has been severely affected, as it only has a limited number of generation sources, namely Koeberg Nuclear Power Station (base supply) along with other power stations used for peak load running such as Ankerlig, Palmiet, etc. Koeberg Nuclear Power Station is located at the end of a long transmission line with no other base-load generation for 1500km, between the power station and the mass pool of coal-fired generation in Mpumalanga. Koeberg Nuclear Power Station (herein referred to as "Koeberg") plays a significant role in ensuring the stability of the Western Cape's electricity network. Without this power stattion, the network power flow is greatly affected, and is placed under severe strain. Koeberg is the determining factor when the system operators control the Western Cape network. The network is modelled having one of Koeberg's unit offline, using contingency analysis N-1. The one Koeberg unit being the N-1 contingency factored into the transmission network. The network should be able to withstand a disturbance with one Koeberg unit out of service and maintain stability after the disturbance. With the Eskom's decision to increase Koeberg power plant's electrical output power, it became apparent that the impact of this upgrade needed to be assessed. In the past, various hand calculations and assumptions were made before implementation of these types of changes could occur. With the advent of technology, modern computer-based software simulation tools have reduced the time to analyse such changes and aid engineers to quickly assess the impact it would have on various components. A load flow and short circuit studies of the Koeberg internal networks were performed and verified against plant data. The original data was compared to simulated data using a computer-based simulation package. The simulation software package used to validate the results is the DIgSILENT software package. This is one of the standard software packages used by Eskom to validate models on the network. Load flow studies for Koeberg have been completed in the past, but many changes have since been made to the plant. There was thus a requirement to re-calculate the original load flow studies and ensure that all plant and protection settings are within an acceptable criterion. This new study found that there were minor errors in the on-site documentation and that the software is compatible with the plant data.

Grantor dc:publisher.institution

Department of Electrical Engineering

Year dc:date.issued

2016

Author dc:creator

• Emmanuel, Paul

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Folly, Komla A

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

http://hdl.handle.net/11427/20322

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:open.uct.ac.za:11427/20322