Budeanu's concept of reactive and distortion power revisited

Abstract

Budeanu's concept of reactive and distortion power for systems operating under nonsinusoidal conditions has been subject to criticism throughout the past decades, which finally led to its removal from the latest standards. Recently, some new results are presented that shed a new light on Budeanu's reactive power and its compensation. In this paper, a further analysis is presented to reveal the possibility to endow Budeanu's reactive and distortion powers with physical meaning. For linear and time-invariant systems it is shown that Budeanu's reactive power is representing the average of the time-varying amplitude of the oscillation of the magnetic and the electric energies. Budeanu's distortion power, after an appropriate decomposition, represents a measure of the power fluctuations around the active power and Budeanu's reactive power.