Power quality: monitoring and innovation in PFC and harmonic filtering

Electricity quality has become a great concern for both energy suppliers and their customers because the increasing use of sensitive devices and the significant consequences of a poor power quality for the competitiveness of the companies. To maintain the level of disturbances within the limits defined by the contracts, the utilities set up rules for the connection of the customers. To respect the emission levels, it is in the interest of the industrial and tertiary customers to use monitoring system to measure the power quality in their installation. When a poor quality is detected, the installation of solutions to limit the level of disturbances produced by the devices, equipment and systems is necessary. The paper will discuss the different aspects of the power quality: voltage dips and interruptions, harmonics, overvoltages, voltage fluctuations, voltage unbalance and the origins of these disturbances. The paper will describe the interest of the installation of fixed monitoring system in the consumer facilities and how these devices can prevent and detect power quality problems. The paper will present innovative solutions for power factor correction and harmonic filtering. The development of hybrid filter is a high performance solution to reduce the disturbances and respect the contractual current distortion limits. The real time compensation system is an new solution to reduce the voltage fluctuations caused by highly transient or unstable loads and to reduce the switching transients.