A NEW ALGORITHM FOR OPTIMAL TUNING OF FACTS DAMPING CONTROLLER

This paper establishes the linearized Phillips- Heffron model of a power system equipped with unified power flow controller (UPFC) and designs the UPFC damping stabilizer to improve power system oscillation stability. The design problem is converted to an optimization problem with the eigenvalue-based objective function which is solved by the new and simple strategy of particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm called ?- PSO technique. Damping controller is tuned to simultaneously shift the undamped electromechanical modes to a prescribed zone in the s-plane. The effectiveness and performance of the proposed controller is demonstrated through eigenvalue analysis, nonlinear time-domain simulation and some performance indices studies. The results analysis reveals that the designed ?- PSO based UPFC controller tuned has an excellent capability in damping power system low frequency oscillations under different operating conditions.