Fault tolerant-based virtual actuator design for wide-area damping control in power system

The objective of this article is to enhance the wide-area damping control of a large power system against actuator faults. In specific, damping of low-frequency system oscillations is carried out through centralized MIMO-based dynamic feedback controller (DFC). This particular approach requires multiple actuators, failure of which deteriorates dynamic response of the system. The problem of actuator faults is resolved using online reconfigurable control (RC). A reconfiguration component called virtual actuator (VA) is designed such that it reconfigures the system input and output signals and hides actuator fault from DFC. The process of control reconfiguration on actuator fault is automated without any additional control action. The effectiveness of the control methodology is verified by evaluating the dynamic system response of standard test systems using (1) multiple output DFC in damping control, and (2) online RC in design of fault tolerant wide-area damping controller.