A New Fast Track to Nonlinear Modal Analysis of Power System Using Normal Form

The inclusion of higher-order terms in small-signal (modal) analysis augments the information provided by linear analysis and enables better dynamic characteristic studies on the power system. This can be done by applying Normal Form theory to simplify the higher order terms. However, it requires the preliminary expansion of the nonlinear system on the normal mode basis, which is impracticable with standard methods when considering large scale systems. In this paper, we present an efficient numerical method for accelerating those computations, by avoiding the usual Taylor expansion. Our computations are based on prescribing the linear eigenvectors as unknown field in the initial nonlinear system, which leads to solving linear-only equations to obtain the coefficients of the nonlinear modal model. In this way, actual Taylor expansion and associated higher order Hessian matrices are avoided, making the computation of the nonlinear model up to third order and nonlinear modal analysis fast and achievable in a convenient computational time. The proposed method is demonstrated on a single-machine-infinite-bus (SMIB) system and applied to IEEE 3-Machine, IEEE 16-Machine and IEEE 50-Machine systems.