Critical Clearing Time Estimates of Power Grid Faults via a Set-Based Method

Abstract: This paper is concerned with estimating critical clearing times in the transient stability problem of power grids without extensive time-domain simulations. We consider a highdimensional post-fault system (the grid after the fault is cleared) which we decouple into many smaller subsystems. Then, for each subsystem, we find the so-called safety sets and simulate the faulted system once to deduce the so-called safe and unsafe critical clearing times, which specify the intervals of time over which the fault may remain active before safety is compromised. We demonstrate the approach with a numerical example involving the IEEE 14 bus system.