Design and control of unified power quality conditioner using soft computing techniques

Abstract

Recent advancement in the technology has revolutionized the power sector industries in terms of both speed and accuracy. In the power electronics industries major challenge is maintaining the quality of power which is largely dependent on the harmonics reduction for efficient operation of the instruments. Harmonics not only lowers down the power factor but also results in excess heating and losses. Moreover, the quality of power is also affected by various other factors such as harmonic contamination, nonlinear load and voltage sag-swell etc. For the power system engineer, controlling and maintaining the quality of power factor in the desired level is the important task. Maintaining the voltage and current level constant during the operation time will be tedious because of variation of load side voltage and power line loss etc. To maintain the quality of power Unified Power Quality Conditioner (UPQC) has received special attention during the last two decades due to their significant advantages in maintaining the quality of power at varying load or voltage fluctuations. UPQC is a conventional power device that comprises of shunt and series converters connected back to back on the dc side and handles load current and supply voltage imperfections. Various power quality problems such as voltage harmonics, voltage unbalance, voltage flickers, voltage sags, voltage swells, current harmonics, current unbalance, reactive current, etc can be compensated using UPQC. Recent times UPQC with renewable energy can be used for effectively improving the power quality of an electrical power system as use of an alternative green energy is gaining wide spread attraction. Renewable energy resources play an important role in electric power generation. newline