Seismic resilience assessment and improvement framework for electrical substations

Authors:
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
Experience from previous earthquakes shows that electrical substations are the most vulnerable components within the power transmission system. Thus, their disaster resilience is essential for providing electric power to communities in earthquake‐prone regions. In this study, a quantitative framework was proposed to assess the seismic resilience of electrical substations. The functionality of a substation was quantified using its maximum allowable transmission capacity that integrates the substation topology, redundancy level, line capacity, and power balance. The network model of the substation was developed to investigate how component damage affects substation's functionality. Substation's recovery was simulated as a time‐stepping process, in which at each time step the substation's ability to provide transmission capacity was conditioned on the functionality state of its components, whose recovery depends on the availability of repair crews and spare parts. The uncertainty of the resilience assessment was quantified by considering the uncertainty in the component‐level vulnerability and recoverability. The impacts of components’ robustness, repair resource constraints, and post‐earthquake recovery scheduling on substation resilience were investigated by modifying components’ seismic fragility curves, available recovery resources, and repair priorities. A case study was conducted on a real‐world 220/110 kV step‐down substation, and a parametric analysis was carried out to investigate the effect of various seismic resilience improvement strategies to demonstrate the applicability of the proposed framework in seismic disaster risk reduction and management.
Funding Information
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (51878508)
  • China Scholarship Council (202006260220)

This publication has 35 references indexed in Scilit: