Harmonic Distortion Minimization in Power System Using Differential Evolution Based Active Power Filters

Aims: The main focus of this work is to improve balanced and sinusoidal grid currents by feeding compensating current at the point of common coupling (PCC). Background: In recent years, the advancement in electronics and electrical appliances is widely improved and is also more sophisticated. These appliances require uninterrupted and quality power. Therefore in the growing power system scenario, several issues like malfunction of electrical sensitive devices, overheat in transformer, interference in communication, failures in the computer network, etc., adversely affect the power quality (PQ). These issues are generated due to the rapid use of non-linear loads in a three-phase system, which generates harmonics in the system. To overcome these PQ issues, several PQ mitigation custom power devices are integrated into the power distribution network. However, the conventional PQ mitigation devices are insufficient to eliminate PQ problems such as current and voltage harmonics, voltage sag/swell and voltage unbalances associated with the power distribution network. Objective: The objective of using A-PSO was to find the global optimum of the spread factor parameter at the upper level. A-PSO has a faster convergence speed and correct response compared to the PSO algorithm. Methods: PSO, A-PSO and M p-q were used in this study. Results: A-PSO gave better results than PSO. Conclusion: A three-phase system with SHAPF injected at PCC is proposed in this paper. The SHAPF injects filter current at PCC for suppressing the harmonics using a modified pq scheme. For controlling the PIC, two optimised parameters are discussed and found that reducing the harmonics distortions using A-PSO is giving better results compared to the conventional PSO.