Harmonic current pollution in a low voltage network

Abstract

Modern household customers use many power electronic based devices for their daily usage. Those devices emit harmonic current pollutions and eventually increase harmonic voltage distortion level in the network. In the future network, the background harmonic pollution in the MV and upstream networks could increase with the integration of more distributed generations. Thus, the harmonic related problem will increase in the network and therefore should be considered seriously. With the distorted supply voltage, most of the devices produce even more harmonic current pollutions. In this paper, three typical households are modeled with their various connected devices. Each device is tested in the laboratory to find out its harmonic current emission spectrum for different grid voltage conditions. Also, harmonic current spectrums are measured in the laboratory at each of the three house model's terminal. Further, harmonic simulation is done on a typical low voltage network in which several household customers are connected and the above measured harmonic spectrums of households are used in the analysis. Harmonic current emission levels at different points of the network are calculated. Those values are compared with the laboratory measurements and also with the available standard limits. This analysis gives an overview of harmonic current emission level at different installations of a low voltage network.