Simulation of the impact of harmonics on distribution transformers

The harmonic power losses cause increased operational costs and additional heating in power system components, which will reduce their expected lifetime. This is especially in the commercial building, where the usage of power is very high as there are many large scale types of equipment being used. This paper presents the effect of harmonic current distortion on the transformer useful life, K-factor calculation and using Malaysian standard to be compared in these finding. In this paper the impact of harmonic distortion on the selected distribution transformer in Universiti Teknologi Malaysia are discussed. For this research, the harmonic problem can be analyzed with the simulations, real measurements and assessments. The results show that an increase in the current harmonic distortion can increase the transformer losses and decreased it life expectancy.