Critical Analysis of the Current and Voltage Superposition Approaches at Sharing Harmonic Distortion Responsibility

Faced with the guidelines contained in documents approved by the National Electric Power Agency PRODIST ‑ Module 8, amongst other indicators of electric power supply quality, the harmonic distortions appear as an important issue. The mentioned regulation takes into account specific matters such as definitions, measurement procedures, benchmarks, etc. Focusing the subject of voltage distortions and the establishment of approaches to determine the responsibility for possible violations of given limits emerges as an important task. This research topic has been taken into account by the literature and a few procedures to characterize the responsibility of a given distortion level due to supplier and consumer has been proposed. The most widespread solutions are based on frequency domain superposition principles. Having this in mind, the current paper conducts a critical analysis performance of the superposition methodology throughout two possible ways of dealing with the subject. The first uses the current contributions and the other by focusing the voltage harmonic found at a given busbar. The studies highlight that the current procedure do not lead to consistent results whereas the voltage method seems to provide a promising manner of dealing with the identification of the harmonic distortion responsibility.