Analysis of harmonics in an educational institution and active filter design for mitigation

Power Quality issues are becoming a major concern for today's power system engineers. Harmonics play significant role in deteriorating power quality, called harmonic distortion. Harmonic distortion in electric distribution system is increasingly growing due to the widespread use of nonlinear loads. In this paper an attempt has been made to study and analyze the harmonic distortions caused by certain typical non-linear loads of an educational institution-Government Engineering College, Thrissur and design an active filter for compensating these harmonics. The typical loads include lightning loads, computer centre, electrical machine laboratory etc. The results showed that the total harmonic distortions caused by these loads far exceeded the standard limit. Active power filters have been considered a potential candidate to bring these harmonic distortions within the IEEE limits. This paper also deals with an active power filter (APF) based on synchronous detection algorithm. The synchronous detection method is applied to calculate compensating currents while the three phase source is feeding a highly non-linear load..MATLAB model of the scheme is simulated and obtained results are studied.