Harmonics in sea and undersea vehicles: sources, effects, and solutions

Power electronics non-linear loads are used widely in the new sea and undersea vehicles that employ integrated power systems. These high power non-linear electrical loads draw non-sinusoidal currents that create voltage harmonics, which propagate throughout the ship power system. In this paper, harmonic producing loads on a ship power system are described and the effects of harmonics in the system are explained. Different methods to mitigate current and voltage harmonics are described. In the last section, modeling and analysis of non-linear systems and harmonic estimation using generalized state space averaging method is explained.