Software Patches

January 11, 2024

Features and Improvements

  • Transient Stability: Customer had reported a long duration of Simulator window not responding, at the end of a distributed transient stability run. This was because contents of the AUX file produced during a transient contingency were ALL being loaded back into memory of the primary Simulator program. The amount of time for this can be significant, and this operation has now been threaded to allow results to be loaded back into memory as the results are returned from the distributed processes.
  • Bug Fixes

    • Case Information Displays: The Power Flow Jacobian Case Information Display was not updating if generators changed from PQ to PV. The Jacobian itself was updated correctly but the grid would leave previously populated fields populated when they should be blank. This has been fixed.
    • File Formats: Made some fixes when writing substation data to RAW files. Specifically errors were reported by a user when loading a version 35 RAW file created in Simulator into PSS/E - "FATAL: Cannot place substation switching device between nodes belonging to two different buses in the same substation." Invalid latitude and longitude values for a substations are now written as 0 instead of the Simulator internal defaults for invalid values.

    • File Formats: When writing a version 35 RAW file, switching devices that are set to Allow Consolidation = NO are written in the System Switching Device section to prevent errors when loading into PSS/E that "Cannot place substation switching device between nodes belonging to two different buses in the same substation."
    • File Formats: When writing out RAW files with substations, additional checks were added to substation names that are required in RAW files only.
      1. Substation names can not contains any quotation marks
      2. Substation names must be unique across then entire case in PSS/E.
      When exporting to a RAW file any substation name containing a single or double quote has these characters replaced with an underscore. For duplicate substation names, the substation with the largest number of buses maintains the name. Other substations have _1, _2, etc. appended to the substation name in the RAW file.
    • File Formats: When writing out the normal status of device to RAW files we were flipping the logic. This has been fixed.
    • File Formats: When writing out substation names to a RAW file the maximum number of characters is 40. We now truncate names to 40 characters.
    • File Formats: When writing out a RAW file, the load records now left justify the IDs. This was done so that the Load records would match the terminal equipment IDs in the substation portion of the RAW file.
    • File Formats: Also modified so that switching devices that are between different SuperBuses will always be written as system switching devices.