A new method of passive harmonic filter planning for controlling voltage distortion in a power system

This paper presents a new method for planning single-tuned passive harmonic filters to control harmonic voltage and voltage distortion throughout a power system. Several alternative objective functions are considered as performance indices in the filter planning problem while the IEEE-519 individual and total harmonic voltage distortion limits at each network bus, as well as filter component limits, are modeled as constraints. The tuned frequency deviation of the filter caused by component manufacturing errors and environmental changes is also taken into account. To solve the problem, a two-step procedure is first proposed to place the filters. Next, the planning problem is formulated as a constrained optimization problem for minimizing the defined network objective function and is then solved by a genetic algorithm-based optimizer to obtain the optimal size of each filter component. The usefulness of the proposed method is tested with an actual distribution network. Results show that the method is effective, computationally robust, and is suitable for the passive filter planning in a power system.