Power quality improvement in induction furnace using eleven level cascaded inverter based DSTATCOM

In power distribution networks, the use of non-linear loads is expanding day by day due to which the power quality of the system is being deteriorated. An induction furnace is one such typical example of a non-linear load which is indispensable component of the steel industries. It injects considerable amount of harmonics into the supply network and consequently the performance of other loads in its vicinity gets affected. In this paper, the application of an eleven level Cascaded Multilevel Inverter (CMLI) based Distribution Static Compensator (DSTATCOM) is presented to improve the power quality of an induction furnace in a steel industry. The experimental readings of the induction furnace are obtained using power quality analyser and then an equivalent model of this induction furnace has been developed in Matlab Simulink platform using real world industrial data. The solution methodology proposed by CMLI based DSTATCOM reveals the effectiveness of proposed control strategy for voltage sag mitigation and Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) improvement of both load current and voltage as per the IEEE standards.