Electronic Thesis/Dissertation
 

Electric Power Grid Resilience Against Electromagnetic Pulse (EMP) Disturbances

Open Access

Electromagnetic pulse (EMP) disturbances have been received, along with other cyber and physical attacks, as a potential threat to modern digitized power grids and the national security. While the EMP attacks are not lethal to human being, they bring extremely harmful and unrecoverable damages to electronics. Irrespective of the type of the EMP attacks, either nuclear or nonnuclear, EMPs are considered among the high-impact low-probability (HILP) weapon of mass destruction (WMD) and weapon of mass effect (WME) events. While such severe events cause electronics melt down with prolonged and extensive electric outages, the conventional reliability view is insufficient to coping with such challenges on the modern power systems. The detection technology on such weapons is in lack of advanced developments and the attack forewarning is extremely hard to predict. Therefore, detection techniques, modeling frameworks, and mitigation plans against which is a necessity to ensure and further improve the resilience of the power grids against such HILP events. This thesis firstly focuses on investigating damages caused by EMP attacks of different patterns and realizations. Individual component in power grids such as coaxial wires and transmission towers will be analyzed under EMP attack scenarios to evaluate their vulnerability and electromagnetic compatibility (EMC). Grid scale system vulnerability to EMP threats is next pursued on various networks of different size and complexity such as 4-bus, 150-bus, and 2000-bus systems. Eventually, some protection and mitigation plans against EMP attacks will be studied, where simulations support the protection effectiveness and resilience in power grids against EMP attacks.

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