Performance Comparison of Power Quality Improvement Strategies for Unified Power Quality Conditioner in an Interconnected Distribution System

In current era the operation of power electronic devices in power system is becoming enormous to enhance the utilization of electric power in an interconnected distribution system to increase the reliability of sophisticated lifestyle of deregulated electricity market, which alarms the power system engineers about the impact of power quality issues and the need for improving the quality of electric power supplied to the consumers. The effects produced by the interconnected power system having renewable energy based electric power generating systems and non-linear loads cause harmonics, voltage variations in the system, which can be mitigated with the help of Unified Power Quality Conditioner (UPQC). This paper presents the performance comparison two different control techniques adopted in the design of UPQC namely synchronous detection method (SDM) and instantaneous direct and quadrature (id-iq) method. The proposed UPQC mitigates the voltage variations such as voltage sag/swell and harmonics present in an interconnected distribution system and improve the electric power quality supplied to the consumers as per the IEEE standard 519-1992. The application of SDM and id-iq method is to generate the compensation current, voltage required by the UPQC and results in the effective elimination of short time voltage variation disturbances and harmonics at the point of common coupling (PCC). The entire system has been modeled using MATLAB SIMULINK environment.