A generalized admittance criterion for dominant harmonic source determination without synchronous phasor measurements

Abstract

The widespread integration of various nonlinear power electronic devices in modern power systems has made harmonic distortion more serious than ever before. Given the urgent need to improve power quality, the harmonic contribution evaluation (HCE) is of great importance since it can provide a strong basis for harmonic mitigation measures. However, the conventional HCE methods are not effective due to the lack of synchronous voltage and current phasor information in real-field practice. To overcome the phasor limitation, an HCE method based on a generalized admittance criterion (GAC) is proposed in this paper. The proposed GAC aims to determine the dominant harmonic source at the point of common coupling (PCC) from the utility side and customer side. Compared to the conventional method, the developed method only needs the RMS values of the PCC voltage, current, and phase angle difference. Therefore, the synchronous phasor information of voltage and current is no longer required. Meanwhile, a threshold to determine the dominant harmonic source is established by using the equivalent admittance ratio on both sides of PCC. The evaluation process of the proposed method is significantly simplified by comparing the generalized admittance limit with the proposed threshold, which also greatly improves the method evaluation accuracy. Moreover, the interference of background harmonic fluctuation is excluded by using the linear calibration-based harmonic admittance estimation method. Finally, multiple scenarios with various admittance characteristics were simulated to verify the performance of the proposed criterion, and the real-field measurement is also used to demonstrate the accuracy and validity of the proposed method.