Power flow method using a dedicated mixed-signal hardware platform

Recent work in the field of analog computing has shown that electronic emulation circuits are of large interest when targeting the speed of routines dedicated to power systems. In this paper, a power flow implementation is presented that is tailored to such a mixed-signal computing platform. A computation time of a few microseconds per algorithm iteration is reported. This time is also almost independent of the network size. Convergence in the modified algorithm is usually achieved in less than ten iterations for systems of small and moderate size. This yields an average solution speed of the power flow problem that is in the order of a hundred of microseconds.