Jacobi load flow accelerator using FPGA

Abstract

Full-AC load flow is a crucial task in power system analysis. Solving full-AC load flow utilizes iterative numerical methods such as Jacobi, Gauss-Seidel or Newton-Raphson. Newton-Raphson is currently the preferred solver used in industrial applications such as power world and PSS/E due to it faster convergence than either Jacobi or Gauss-Seidel. In this paper, we reexamine the Jacobi method for use in a fully pipelined hardware implementation using a field programmable gate array (FPGA) as an alternative to Newton-Raphson. Using benchmark data from representative power systems, we compare the operation counts of Newton-Raphson software to the proposed Jacobi FPGA hardware. Our studies show that Jacobi method implemented in an FPGA for a sufficiently large power system has the potential to be a state of the art full-AC load flow engine.