Harmonics mitigation in distributed generation system: Performance investigation

Increased uses of nonlinear loads, encouragement to use distributed generations at the consumer premises make the power system fail to sustain quality of the supply. Due to this supply voltage and current becomes distorted and contain harmonics which is not good for machineries and applications used by industry, domestic and residential consumers. Among the different configurations of filters such as series, shunt and hybrid, shunt active power filter is considered in this research work. The actual behaviour of shunt active power filter lies with the proper control strategy. It is expected that the control strategy should take care of harmonic mitigation and power factor improvement with less complexity in controller implementation. Moreover the available control strategy takes care of mostly current harmonics and rarely in voltage harmonics. Furthermore only few research contributions have been made to mitigate the voltage harmonics in addition to current harmonics. A MATLAB model has been developed to simulate the system operation by considering different control schemes and simulation have been carried out and results are obtained under steady state and dynamic conditions.