Assessment of light flicker mitigation using shunt compensators

The main objective of this paper is to compare the relative effectiveness of shunt compensators in mitigating light flicker caused by arc furnace. A test system comprising an arc furnace model built in PSCAD/EMTDC is simulated with and without the static Var compensator (SVC) and static synchronous compensator (STATCOM). Compensation characteristics of the devices are measured in terms of flicker severity indices (P_st) using IEC compliant flicker meter model developed in PSCAD/EMTDC. The simulation results demonstrate that the STATCOM has superior flicker reduction capacity than the SVC due to its inherently faster response.