Implementing Unified Power Quality Conditioner (UPQC) to Tackle Transient Disturbances in Nigeria's 132/33kV Transmission Network

The study examines system's disturbances arising from the rapid increase in load demand due to urbanization on the 132kV Afam Port-Harcourt power transmission network. The prevalent disturbances encountered by this network are voltage sags, voltage swells and harmonic distortion which often occur during the switching operation of heavy-duty electrical devices in the network. However, this has been a major challenge to the management of the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) as its 132/33kV Port-Harcourt Main network lacks the required equipment to tackle these disturbances in real-time so as to prevent power supply interruptions and ensure quality power delivery. In addressing these challenges, the 132/33kV network is modelled in MATLAB R2022a/Simulink and the load of the network conducted in MATLAB using Newton Raphson's method. The network is simulated without the incorporation of Unified Power Quality Conditioner (UPQC) and found that under disturbance conditions, the load end is instantly affected for more than 0.2secs which causes interruption in the network but when UPQC is added into the network and the simulation is repeated, the load end experiences a completely sinusoidal and perfectly balanced waveform despite the occurrence of a disturbance and the system is able to detect the disturbance and mitigate it within 0.2secs and thus, the load end becomes free of abnormalities which has been disturbing the system.