Water Cycle Algorithm Applied to Improve Transient Power System Stability

Nowadays, improving power system stability is a major concern for researchers and industrial electricity companies. The lack or the wrong parameters choice of PSS causes total blackout of the electrical power supply grid. In this paper, a new optimization method called Water Cycle Algorithm (WCA) has been developed to optimize the parameters of the power system stabilizer (PSS) to improve the stability performance of the electrical grid by minimizing rotor speed deviation caused by a strong fault presented by a thermodynamic failure. The performance of the suggested method was evaluated by applying a thermodynamic fault (sudden change in mechanical torque) on the famous power system of Single Machine Infinite Bus (SMIB) power system model. Results of the MATLAB simulation using (WCA) are compared with those of other meta-heuristic optimization methods as Genetic Algorithms (GA) and Crow Search Algorithm (CSA to evaluate the performance of the proposed method for the same test system.