Investigations on Distribution Load Flow Methods in a Radial Distribution Network

This paper presents a comparative Study of various Distribution Load Flow (DLF) methods for a Radial Distribution System. The DLF methods considered here are Current Injection Method based DLF (CIM), Vector Based DLF (VDLF), Matpower based DLF, Forward Backward sweep based DLF (FBLF) and Network Topology based DLF method (NTLF). Among all methods NTLF is found to be most efficient and uses graph theory and matrix algebra concepts based on simple matrix multiplication. On an IEEE 33 bus and PG&E 69 bus radial distribution test system, the convergence ability of all the approaches is evaluated by taking into account voltage profile, active and reactive power losses, iterations, and computational time.