Review of Some Effects of Harmonics in Nonsinusoidal Systems

This paper presents a few effects of harmonics in nonsinusoidal systems, focusing especially on power efficiency. In the introductory section some general effects of harmonics in power systems are presented. Considering the importance of harmonics in different power definitions, the following section presents a brief review of the debate which lasted almost one century on this matter, debate which culminated with the most recent IEEE Standard 1459-2010. The third section presents a case study performed at the secondary windings of a transformer substation which supplies a highly polluted industrial environment, using an electrical network analyzer. This last section reveals that the power analyzer used, as most of the metering instrumentation available is designed and built following the longstanding tradition and not the recent IEEE standard. The main objective of this paper is to perform a short review of power definitions in nonsinusoidal systems and to present the key role of harmonics.