Strategic placement and sizing of passive filters in a power system for controlling voltage distortion

This paper presents an approach for determining optimal or near-optimal locations and sizes of single-tuned passive harmonic filters among existent capacitor busses in a power system. The objective of the harmonic filter planning is to control the system-wide voltage distortion, while individual/total harmonic voltage distortion limits at each network bus, and the filter component limits are considered as constraints. The tuned frequency deviation of the filter caused by component manufacturing errors and environment is also taken into account in the problem. The proposed two-phase planning procedure is first to formulate an unconstrained optimization problem for placement of the filters based on sensitivity analysis. Next, a constrained problem is formulated and is solved by a genetic algorithm-based optimizer. The proposed method is tested with an actual distribution system. Test results show that the method is effective, computationally robust, and suitable for passive filter planning in a power system.