DEPARTMENT OF ELECTRICAL ENGINEERING

ALIGARH MUSLIM UNIVERSITY

ALIGARH (INDIA)

Ref No:…………………… Dated:……………………

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CANDIDATE’S DECLARATION
I, Mohd Zuhaib, research scholar at Department of Electrical Engineering,
declare that the work embodied in this Ph.D. thesis is my own work carried out by me
under the supervision of Dr. Mohd Rihan, Professor at Department of Electrical
Engineering, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh. The matter embodied in this Ph.D.
thesis has not been submitted for the award of any other degree.

I declare that I have faithfully acknowledged, given credit to and referred to the
research workers wherever their works have been cited in the text and the body of the
thesis. I further certify that I have not willfully lifted up some other’s Work, Para,
Text, Data, Findings, etc. reported in the Journals, Books, Magazines, Reports,
Dissertations, Theses, etc., or available at websites and included them in this Ph.D.
thesis and cited as my own work.

Dated: Mohd Zuhaib

Enrolment No.: GF-2728

CERTIFICATE FROM THE CHAIRMAN, SUPERVISOR

This is to certify that the above statement made by the candidate is correct to
the best of my knowledge.

Prof. Salman Hameed Prof. Mohd Rihan

Chairman Supervisor
Department of Electrical Engineering Department of Electrical Engineering
Aligarh Muslim University Aligarh Muslim University
Aligarh. India Aligarh. India

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 COURSE/COMPREHENSIVE EXAMINATION/
PRE-SUBMISSION SEMINAR COMPLETION
CERTIFICATE
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Ref No:…………………… Dated:……………………

This is to certify that Mr. Mohd Zuhaib, research scholar at Department of

Electrical Engineering has satisfactory completed the course work/comprehensive
examination and pre-submission seminar requirement which is part of his Ph.D.
programme.

Prof. Salman Hameed

(Chairman)
Department of Electrical Engineering
Aligarh Muslim University
Aligarh

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 COPYRIGHT TRANSFER CERTIFICATE

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Title of the Thesis: IMPLEMENTATION OF SELF-HEALING GRID
WITH ENHANCED SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

Candidate’s Name: MOHD ZUHAIB

COPYRIGHT TRANSFER

The undersigned hereby assigns to the Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh, copyright
that may exist in and for the above thesis submitted for the award of Ph.D. degree.

Dated: Mohd Zuhaib

Enrolment No.: GF-2728

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Phone: +91-571-2700920(O) Extn: 3186, 3742, E-mail: m.rihan..ee@amu.ac.in, www.amu.ac.in

Dr. Mohd Rihan

Professor Ph.D. (Electrical Engineering)
Department of Electrical Engineering M. Tech.
Director Centre for Integrated Green and Renewable Energy B. Tech. (Gold Medalist)
Member In-charge Electricity Department Senior Member IEEE, Fellow
Visiting Scientist, National Institute of Solar Energy IET (UK), Fellow IETE, Fellow
Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh-202 002, India. IE

CERTIFICATE

This is to certify that the thesis entitled, “Implementation of Self-Healing

Grid With Enhanced Situational Awareness" submitted by Mr. Mohd Zuhaib,
under Enrolment No. GF-2728 and Faculty No. 15PHDEED-11, to the Department of
Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering & Technology, Aligarh Muslim
University, Aligarh (India), for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
Electrical Engineering is a record of bonafide research work carried out by him under
my supervision and guidance. The thesis work, in my opinion, has reached the
requisite standard fulfilling the requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
with papers published in international journals and conference proceedings.

The results contained in this thesis have not been submitted in part or full to
any other University or Institute for award of the degree or diploma to the best of my
knowledge.

(Dr. Mohd Rihan)

Supervisor
Professor
Department of Electrical Engineering
Z.H. College of Engineering. & Technology
A.M.U., Aligarh-202002, India.

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 THESIS APPROVAL SHEET

The thesis entitled “IMPLEMENTATION OF SELF-HEALING GRID

WITH ENHANCED SITUATIONAL AWARENESS” submitted by Mr.

Mohd Zuhaib is approved for the award of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in
Electrical Engineering.

(Supervisor) (External Examiner)

Prof. Salman Hameed

(Chairman)
Department of Electrical Engineering
Zakir Husain College of Engineering and Technology
Aligarh Muslim University
Aligarh

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 ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

In the name of Allah, the most Beneficent and Merciful, who has provided me
the strength for my research and has blessed me with the presence of many people,
who helped me in this endeavour.
I would like to express my deep gratitude to my supervisor, Prof. Mohd
Rihan. Thank you for your continuous guidance, support and encouragement
throughout my research work. Without your guidance, advice and valuable input on
my research ideas and writings, this work would not have been possible.
I would like to express my special thanks to Prof. Salman Hameed,
Department of Electrical Engineering, AMU, Aligarh for providing me a good
platform and facility to accomplish the work. Further, I would also like to extend
my sincere thanks to other faculty members of this department who directly or
indirectly helped me complete this research successfully. Special thanks to Mr. Anas
Anees and Mr. Hasan Saboor for their support.
I also take this opportunity to express a deep sense of gratitude to my friend
Mohd Tayyab Saeed and Mirza Tabish Shah Beg for their continuous support,
motivation, and help. I want to personally thank: Abul Khair, Marwan Ahmed
Abdullah Sufyan and Gulezar Shamim for their invaluable friendship and for
always being a source of cheerfulness, motivation and support.
I am also thankful to my friends Sharique Alam, Junaid Ahmad, Mohd
Huzaifa, Syed Abid Zaki, Nadeem Ahmad, Khalid Saeed, Mohammad Ahzam,
Obair Qayyum, Mohd Sartaj, Mohammad Zaid, Mohammad Tayyab, Mohd
Mazhar, Hannan Ahmad Khan, Shoeb Ahmad, Mohd Danish, Qurratulain, Riyaz
Hussain, for their constant support, encouragement, suggestions and love. My
sincere thanks to those endless lists of people who, in one way or the other, have
helped me in this research with contacts, information and material. Without your
help, this thesis would not have been of the same solidity and quality.
My deepest and most sincere gratitude goes to my parents for their support and
cooperation. It is my aspiration that this work will serve as a tribute to them for the

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inspiration I gained from them. I am grateful and honoured that I received
everlasting support from my father – Mohd Abul Qasim and from my mother –
Sayyeda Khursheed. I would like to thank my brother Mohd Sarim, sister-in-law
Hina kausar, sister Mehvish Aquib, brother-in-law Mohd Aquib for their belief in
me through the most obscure moments in my career and helped me a lot during every
stage of my life.
I gratefully acknowledge University Grants Commission (UGC), India for
providing me Maulana Azad National Fellowship (MANF) as a financial
assistance for my research work.
Finally, I am obliged to all those, who have directly or indirectly helped me in
completing this thesis.

(Mohd Zuhaib)

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 ABSTRACT
The recent blackouts around the world have raised serious questions about the
reliability of the power system. Some of the major blackouts are the US‐ Canadian
Blackout of August 14, 2003; Italian Blackout of September 28, 2003; Indonesian
blackout of August 18, 2005; Brazil and Paraguay blackout of November 10, 11, 2009
and the blackout on 30th and 31st July 2012 in northern, eastern and north-eastern part
of India. The power outage in India in July 2012 is supposed to be the biggest power
outage in the world influencing around 600 million individuals. Severe flaws in the
infrastructure, operation and management in Indian power grid were exposed after
these blackouts. An expert committee was formed by the government of India to
determine the root causes that drive power outages. This committee realized the data
from Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system (SCADA), Phasor
Measurement Units (PMUs), digitals fault recorders, digital relays, event loggers and
reports submitted by national, state and regional load dispatch centres. The main
reasons identified for these blackouts were

1) Inadequate real-time situational awareness of the power system grid operators

regarding its operating states.
2) Failure to visualize power system events over a wider area.

The committee recommended that in order to avoid such failures in future, the grid
infrastructure should be upgraded with modern sensors to enhance real-time situational
awareness over a wide area. The main reason is the increasing complexity of modern
power system due to its vast interconnected nature that has driven it to operate under
highly stressed conditions. These stressed conditions are due to increasing
interconnectedness, large geographical spread, dynamic infrastructure, large seasonal
load variation, environmental constraints, integration of renewable energy sources, and
competitive energy market etc. These stressed conditions when exceeds their threshold
limits, may result in dynamic disturbances in the power system such as frequency
deviation from nominal, large angular variations, etc. Under these dynamic conditions,
real-time monitoring of power systems is very important to avoid contingencies by
taking remedial actions and avoiding any potentially dangerous situation.

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The main motivating factor in implementing such a huge interconnected system was to
improve its overall reliability in an economical way. This network has been extended
over a vast area and worked satisfactorily over a century. However, with growing
complexity, the conventional grid model has reached its threshold that hindered its
smooth operation in its current form. Some of the main reasons that demand major
modifications in the conventional grid architecture are:

1) An increase in the frequency of blackouts affects its overall reliability.

2) More customer expectations in current digital world are impossible to cover
with the conventional grid architecture.
3) The inability of the conventional grid model to address environmental
concerns.
4) Integration of Distributed Energy Resources (DERs) like solar and wind raises
challenges.
5) Political and social hindrances in planning, construction and operation of the
grid.

Intelligent monitoring, protection, and control systems are extensively needed for a
modern power grid to prevent widespread disturbances. Self-healing Smart Grid can
provide solutions to such problems. Self-healing Smart Grid implies the power grid is
more aware of its operating states, more resilient against cascading failures, ability to
reconfigure itself to enhance the reliability and continuity of the power supply.
A self-healing grid may be implemented if the following three features are
incorporated in the power grid:
1. Real-time monitoring and control: For better real-time measurement of
voltage, current and other parameters, multiple sensors must be distributed
across the network. These sensors will send measurements over high-speed
communication links to the control centre to manipulate the power flows and
operate the grid safely.
2. Anticipation: The mechanism of a self-healing grid should work to continue
to look for potential problems.
3. Corrective action or isolation: The third feature of a self-healing grid is to
take corrective action if the fault has been detected. If corrective action is not
sufficient to clear that fault, then the faulty section should be isolated from the
rest of the system. In this way, a catastrophic blackout can be prevented.
Various technologies provide a platform for the power grid to attain these features of
self-healing and improve the situational awareness of the grid operators regarding its

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operating states. Deployment of Phasor Measurement Unit (PMU) based Wide Area
Monitoring System (WAMS) is one such initiative to make the grid smarter that
contains all the features of self-healing smart grid. PMUs in WAMS provides time
synchronized measurements of voltage, current and phase angle via Global
Positioning System (GPS) sent through proper communication channel to a PDC,
where they are time aligned, analyzed, and responds to the events in a coordinated
manner. This has created a coherent picture of the entire grid that provides its
dynamic visualization on a single time frame at a much faster rate than the convention
Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition system (SCADA). This improvement in
real-time monitoring of the grid enhances the situational awareness of the grid
operator regarding its operating states and helps them to take corrective actions for
events that may result in a problematic situation or blackouts.
This research work is focused on achieving the self-healing capability for low-
frequency oscillations in the power system. Based on the self-healing requirement of
the smart grid, it should have the following feature. (i) Better real-time monitoring (ii)
Anticipation of generators contributing to low-frequency oscillations (iii) Initiate
corrective action to mitigate low-frequency oscillation.
• Explore the role of Phasor Measurement Units as a key enabling technology in
the development of a self-healing smart grid and provide an objective analysis
of the efforts initiated in this direction by the utilities.

• Examine the role of PMUs in monitoring and examining low-frequency

oscillations present in the system.

• Development of a systematic approach to locate the source of forced

oscillation present in the system.

• Development of PMU based data-driven model of the power system to

analyze inter-area oscillation present in the system.

• Development of an efficient framework to characterize inter-area oscillations

and determine the contribution of generators in each inter-area mode.

• Development of efficient Wide-Area Damping Controller to mitigate both

forced as well as inter-area modes.