On Real-Time Simulation for Harmonic and Flicker Assessment of an Industrial System With Bulk Nonlinear Loads

Abstract

This paper presents application experiences of realtime simulation (RTS) techniques for harmonic and flicker studies of an industrial power system, where the system and nonlinear loads are properly modeled. A PC-cluster-based real-time parallel simulator is implemented under MATLAB/SIMULINK, where the studied system consists of an ac electric arc furnace, dc and ac motor-drive loads, and the static var compensator. Guidelines for model partition of the studied system and the solver settings under an RTS environment are reported. In addition, the most commonly used offline simulation with variable-step solver and the actual field measurements are included for comparison. Results indicate that the RTS achieves satisfactory solution accuracy within much less execution time and can be applied for more complicated studies such as installing new nonlinear loads with different levels of model complexities or designing/tuning mitigation devices of power-quality disturbances, where the repeated time-consuming analysis is required. Index Terms-Electric arc furnace (EAF), flicker, harmonics, motor drives, power quality (PQ), real-time simulation (RTS). I. INTRODUCTIONT HE INCREASING use of power electronic and arcing equipment, such as adjustable-speed motor drives (ASDs) and electric arc furnaces (EAFs), in the industrial environment has led to a growing concern for power-quality (PQ) disturbance and causing considerable impacts on the system and its equipment [1]. Literature survey shows that PQ studies associated with ASDs and EAFs mostly focus on harmonic and flicker assessments and the modeling evaluation [2]- [8], where many of the proposed methods are in the time domain due to the advantages of modeling interactions between the supply system and the nonlinear loads. The most familiar timedomain method is to perform the offline simulation (OLS) by using software packages, such as MATLAB/SIMULINK, PSCAD/EMTDC, SPICE, SABER, and EMTP-RV, so that the Manuscript

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