This paper shows an application of Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) to determine the bus voltages and phase angles of a radial distribution system, without executing the complicated load flow algorithm, for any given load. The performance of the conventional load flow methods such as Newtoh-Raphson load flow, Fast decoupled load flow is found to be very poor under critical conditions such as high R/X ratio, heavily loading condition etc.To overcome the limitations of these regularly used methods a simple and reliable ladder iterative technique is used for solving the power balance equations of radial distribution system (RDS). The proposed method make use of a multi-layer feed forward ANN with error back propagation learning algorithm for calculation of bus voltages and its angles. A sample IEEE 33-bus is extensively tested with the proposed ANN based approach indicating its viability for RDS load flow assessment and results are presented.

Full text: IJEIR-279 final.pdf