Design of Harmonic Filters for Renewable Energy Applications

Harmonics are created by non-linear devices connected to the power system. Power system harmonics are multiples of the fundamental power system frequency and these harmonic frequencies can create distorted voltages and currents. Distortion of voltages and currents can affect the power system adversely causing power quality problems. Therefore, estimation of harmonics is of high importance for efficiency of the power system network. The problem of harmonic loss evaluation is of growing importance for renewable power system industry by impacting the operating costs and the useful life of the system components. Non-linear devices such as power electronics converters can inject harmonics alternating currents (AC) in the electrical power system. The number of sensitive loads that require ideal sinusoidal supply voltage for their proper operation has been increasing. To maintain the quality limits proposed by standards to protect the sensitive loads, it is necessary to include some form of filtering device to the power system. Harmonics also increases overall reactive power demanded by equivalent load. Filters have been devised to achieve an optimal control strategy for harmonic alleviation problems. To achieve an acceptable distortion, increase the power quality and to reduce the harmonics hence several three phase filter banks are used and connected in parallel. In this thesis, high order harmonics cases have been suppressed by employing variants of Butterworth, Chebyshev and Cauer filters. MATLAB/SIMULINK wind farm model was used to generate and analyze the different harmonics magnitude and frequency. High voltage direct current (HVDC) lines for an electrical grid that is more than 50km far away wind farm generation plant was investigated for harmonics. These HVDC lines are also used in offshore wind farm plant. Investigated three-phase harmonics filters are shunt elements that are used in power systems for decreasing voltage distortion and for correcting the power factor. Renewable energy sources are not the stable source of energy generation like wind, solar and tidal e.t.c. Though they are secondary sources of generation and hard to connect with electrical grid. In near future the technique is to use the wave digital filter (WDF) or circulator-tree wave digital filter (CTWDF) for the renewable energy application can be employed to mitigate the harmonics. These WDF and CTWDF can be used in HVDC lines and smart grid applications. A preliminary analysis is conducted for such a study.