A Flicker Compensation Strategy

This letter is concerned with the strategy adopted by an active compensator to mitigate the flicker phenomenon in a power system. After illustrating two conventional strategies, a novel strategy that forces the compensator to deliver a particular value of the instantaneous imaginary power absorbed by the time-variant load is proposed. The strategy is compared with the two conventional ones in terms of magnitude of the voltage fluctuations at the point of common coupling (PCC) and size of the capacitor in the dc bus of the active compensator. Suitable equations and vector diagrams are derived. They show that the novel strategy outweighs the other two by eliminating most of the PCC voltage fluctuations without the need for a large capacitor. The theoretical findings are substantiated by simulation results.