A Fixed Point Method for the AC Power Flow Calculation

This paper presents an AC power flow algorithm using a fixed point method based on the contractive mapping theorem. The method guarantees the algorithm convergence a priori and the uniqueness of the solution, if it exists, while requiring less computational efforts compared to classical methods. The proposed algorithm is firstly applied for the solution of the the power flow problem for the IEEE 14-bus system under load stress scenarios. Then, its performance is compared against a classical Jacobian matrix-based method and the continuation power flow method. The results show that the proposed method provides better accuracy and convergence properties in the vicinity of the critical voltage point, compared to the standard Jacobian matrix-based, Newton-Raphson method.