Impact of hydraulic faults on the electric system in an integrated multi-energy microgrid

Abstract

Undesired behaviors such as cross-network faults start to emerge when energy systems are coupled together. It is important to understand such phenomena and to develop countermeasures to ensure energy supply stability. In this paper, coupled heat and electric system is studied. If a fault happens in the heat system, it is possible that the electric microgrid will get a cascading failure. This is important because hydraulic faults in heat supply systems can happen quite often due to pipe bursts and sometimes can be hard to detect. This fault type may lead to a short-time or constant electrical power surge and power quality degradation. This paper focuses on dynamic modelling and simulation of cross-network fault propagation and its potential impact on low inertia electric microgrid. The presented simulation results suggest that a pipe burst fault can cause significant power increases and a frequency deviation to the low inertia electric microgrid, where the impact depends on the topology of the hydraulic grid and the scale of the microgrid.