IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 19, NO.

2, APRIL 2004

671

A Critical Impedance-Based Method

for Identifying Harmonic Sources
Chun Li, Member, IEEE, Wilsun Xu, Senior Member, IEEE, and Thavatchai Tayjasanant, Student Member, IEEE

AbstractThis paper proposes a new method to determine

whether the utility or the customer side has more contribution
to the harmonic currents measured at the point of common
coupling. The method is inspired by the observation that the
direction of harmonic reactive power, instead of active power, is
a more reliable indicator on the location of dominant harmonic
sources. The method needs approximate impedance information
to operate. Mathematical analysis, simulation studies, and field
measurements have shown that this is a useful, reliable, and
practical solution for the harmonic source detection problem.
Index TermsHarmonic source detection, harmonics, power
quality.

I. INTRODUCTION

DENTIFICATION of harmonic sources in a power system

has been a challenging task for many years. The most
common tool to solve this problem is the harmonic power
direction-based method [1][3]. In this method, if harmonic
active power flows from utility to customer, the utility is
considered as the dominant harmonic generator, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, [4] and [5] have proven that this qualitative
method is theoretically unreliable. Another group of practical
methods for harmonic source detection is to measure the utility
and customer harmonic impedances and then calculate the harmonic sources behind the impedances. There are a number of
variations of this method [6][9]. Although this type of method
is theoretically sound, it is very difficult to implement. The
main problem is that the impedances can only be determined
with the help of disturbances. Such disturbances are not readily
available from the system or are expensive to generate with
intrusive means.
During the course of investigating the problems of the active power direction method, the authors have found that the
reactive power direction is actually a more reliable indicator
on the location of dominant harmonic source. But the inductive or capacitive characteristic of the combined utility and customer impedance affects the direction of reactive power. If one
knows the approximate range of the impedance, however, it is
possible to develop a practical and reliable method for harmonic
source detection. The objective of this paper is to present such
a method. The key idea of this method can be summarized as

Manuscript received October 4, 2001; revised May 10, 2002. This work
was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Council of Canada (NSERC).
The authors are with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G7 Canada.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2004.825302

follows. The harmonic reactive power generated by the utility

source is estimated first. An equivalent impedance (or admittance) that absorbs that reactive power is then determined. This
impedance (or admittance) is termed as critical impedance (or
admittance) (CI or CA). By comparing the CI (or CA) with the
known range of the combined utility and customer impedance
(or admittance), the location of the dominant harmonic source
can be found. The method, therefore, takes advantage of both
the power direction-based and the impedance-based methods.
In this paper, the validity of the method is demonstrated with
theoretical analysis. The method is also verified using computer
simulations and field test results.
This paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the
principle of the method, Section III presents simulation as well
as error analysis results, and Section IV applies the method to
a real power system. Section V discusses an extension of the
method. The paper concludes with Section VI.
II. PRINCIPLE OF THE PROPOSED METHOD
If the current harmonic pollution is mainly concerned, the
problem of harmonic source detection is to determine which
sideutility or customeris the dominant contributor to the
harmonic current measured at the point of common coupling
(PCC). For this problem, it is common to assume that the
utility and customer sides are represented by their respective
Norton equivalent circuits as shown in Fig. 1 [8], [9]. In this
are the customer and utility harmonic current
figure, and
sources, and
and
are the customer and utility harmonic
impedances, respectively. The problem of harmonic source
or
has a larger contribution
detection is to determine if
. As analyzed in [4], this is
to the PCC harmonic current
theoretically equivalent to examining the magnitude of
and
. If
is greater than
, it can be shown
, and vice
that the utility side source contributes more to
versa. Therefore, we can transform the Norton circuit into the
Thevenin equivalent circuit as shown in Fig. 2. In this figure,
,
, and
. The phase
is set to zero and that of
is denoted as . The
angle of
harmonic source detection problem now becomes to identify
or
has a higher magnitude.
which voltage source
A. Problems of Power Direction Method
Since the proposed method is inspired by the active power
direction method, it is worthwhile to examine the problems associated with the method. For simplicity, the case of
is used. Following the classic power-angle equation, for two

0885-8977/04$20.00 2004 IEEE

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 19, NO. 2, APRIL 2004

direction method. In the next section, we will propose a method

.
to address the case of
It should be noted that an important prerequisite for the above
and
. This
reactive power direction method is
condition is generally true at the fundamental frequency, but it
is unlikely true at the harmonic frequencies. A solution to this
problem will be presented in Section IID.
Fig. 1.

Norton equivalent circuit.

B. Proposed Reactive Power-Based Method

Fig. 2.

Thevenin equivalent circuit.

source ac circuits, the power flowing into source

termined as

can be de-

(1)
Note that is the phase angle difference between customer and
utility side voltage sources. The significance of this equation is
that the direction of active power is a function of instead of the
magnitudes of the voltage sources. As a result, the active power
direction-based harmonic source detection method is incorrect
theoretically, as it cannot reveal the difference between the magnitudes of the two sources.
It is common knowledge for power engineers that the phase
angles of bus voltages mainly affect the flow of active power
while the magnitudes of bus voltages mainly affect the flow of
reactive power. One would therefore wonder if the direction of
reactive power could indicate the relative magnitudes of two
harmonic sources. This can be analyzed by examining the reactive power flowing into source
(2)
It shows that the direction of reactive power is indeed related
to the voltage magnitudes. From the equation, if the utility side
absorbs reactive power (
),
must be smaller than .
In other words, one can conclude that the customer side has a
. An intuitive explanation of this conlarger contribution to
clusion is the following: the reactive power absorbed by
must come from
. Since the impedance is reactive,
must
have a sufficiently high magnitude in order to push the reac. If the utility side generates reactive
tive power into source
), however, it does not necessarily imply that the
power (
utility side is the dominant source. This is because the generated reactive power may not reach the customer side since the
line absorbs reactive power. In any case, anyhow, at least one direction of reactive power can give a theoretically correct conclusion, which is an improvement over the unfounded active power

The proposed new method is based on the concept of reactive

power flow and is conceived to address the case of
. The
method relies on the following two assumptions.
The utility side impedance
is approximately known.
This requirement is relatively easier to meet since the
impedance of the step-down transformer generally dominates the system impedance and the system impedance
varies little for distribution systems. The fact that
low-order harmonics (5th to 13th) are those encountered
in most troubleshooting studies also helps to estimate
the range of the system impedance. Our experiences
show that frequency scan studies on a properly developed system model will generally yield an acceptable
range of the impedance. It should be noted, however, the
above conclusion may not be applicable to transmission
systems. The impedance could also be measured [6][8].
The approximate range of the customer side impedance
is known. The customer loads may change a lot and there
are difficulties to determine their representative harmonic
impedances. It is possible, however, to estimate the range
of the impedance using frequency scan analysis on a simulation model of the customer plant. For a plant dominated
with motors and drives, the frequency scan results could
be sufficient. Field measurements could also be conducted
to determine the typical values of the impedance.
The objective here is to develop a robust method to determine
and
given the above conditions.
the relative magnitude of
The method should be able to provide correct answers even if
the range of the combined utility and customer impedance (
) is very large. Since correct conclusions can be drawn
), we
for the case of utility side absorbing reactive power (
need to focus on the cases where reactive power is generated by
and
utility source only. Based on the condition of a known
, the
starting with the simplest case of
can be determined as
utility source
(3)
error will be analyzed later. The key idea
The impact of
of the proposed method is to find how far the reactive power
can travel along the impedance
, if
generated by source
we imagine that the impedance is uniformly distributed between
and
as an impedance line. With this consideration, the
voltage at an arbitrary point along the impedance line can
be determined as (Fig. 3)
(4)

LI et al.: A CRITICAL IMPEDANCE-BASED METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING HARMONIC SOURCES

where
. By letting
find the point with the lowest voltage as

673

, we can

(5)
where is the reactance from
we consider (2) and

to the lowest voltage point. If

(6)
Fig. 3. Determination of voltage at one point along

Equation (5) can be rewritten as

(7)
Since the reactive power absorbed by is
, which is equal
according to (7), one can conclude that all reactive power
to
is absorbed by reactance . In other words,
produced by
is the furthest location where the reactive power output of
can flow to. This location also has the lowest voltage along the
and
.
impedance line between
It is our postulation that if is located closer to the customer
), the utility source is expected to have a larger
side (
magnitude since the source can push its reactive power output
) of the impedance line. Similarly, if
beyond halfway (
or is located closer to the utility side, the customer
source is expected to have a large magnitude. A method to determine the relative magnitude of the two sources can, therefore, be
established on the basis of comparing the magnitudes of and
. Mathematical analysis has shown that this postulation is
or
will
correct. In the following, the criterion
be proven to be the necessary and sufficient condition on which
.
one can conclude
To prove the above postulation, let us assume
where
. By considering (5), the new expression for can
be established as
(8)
The minimum value of

is obtained when

(9)
, all possible
The above equation indicates that if
values of will be greater than
. That is,
is the
to hold. On the other hand, if
necessary condition for
, one will get
given
(10)
Straightforwardly, the condition for the above equation to hold
is
. Therefore, we have proven
(11)
Since the sign of the reactive power absorbed by source
and
are two important parameters for the proposed
the quantity
method, we introduce a signed fictitious impedance to combine

jX .

them into a single index. The new index is called CI and is defined as
(12)
is the reactive power absorbed by
, as shown in
where
,
Fig. 2. Note that CI and have the same signs. So if
which implies the utility absorbs reactive power, we can conclude directly that the customer side is the dominant harmonic
, the utility side generates reactive power. In
source. If
this case, the range of needs to be compared with the absolute
value of CI for determining the dominant source. In summary,
, the proposed method can be implefor the case of
mented as follows.
1. Calculate the utility side voltage source by using
, where
is known.
2. Calculate the reactive power absorbed by
,
, where is the phase by which
leads
.
.
3. Calculate
4. If
, the utility source absorbs reactive power, the
customer side is the main harmonic contributor.
, the utility generates reactive power, the fol5. If
lowing substeps are to be taken:
If
, where
is the maximum of all possible values, the utility side is the main harmonic contributor.
This is because the utility side, due to its high source voltage,
can push its generated reactive power far deep into the customer side;
If
, where
is the minimum of all possible values, the customer side is the main harmonic contributor. This case implies that the customer side source pushes
its reactive power deep into the utility side.
If
, no definite conclusion can
be drawn. But our study results show that such a condition
generally implies that the utility and customer have comparable
contributions to the PCC current. As a result, the exercise to
determine precisely which side has more contribution may just
have academic significance.
C. Error Analysis
The practical applicability of the CI method depends on
its robustness. Since the customer impedance may have large
variations, our knowledge about may have large errors. The
method is expected to have a good tolerance to such errors.
or
, a conclusion can be
For example, if

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 19, NO. 2, APRIL 2004

obtained reliably. If
, however, it will be difficult to
judge which side is the main harmonic contributor. To quantify
the impact of impedance errors, we define an impedance error
tolerance index (IET) as

(13)
where
is the true value of . A larger IET implies a more
reliable answer. The index IET is found to depend on the system
and
. Fig. 4 shows
operation condition characterized by
the voltage magnitude and the reactive power flowing along the
,
, and
impedance line for the case of
. is positive if reactive power flows from customer to utility.
is in phase with
, the utility side
It can be seen that when
generates reactive power while the customer side absorbs. The
and
lowest voltage point, shown by the dotted line, is at
. Accordingly,
is 15 (
is beyond the total reactance
) and IET reaches 200%. This means that we can identify
the harmonic source correctly even if our knowledge on has
leads
by 150 , both the
an error up to 200%. When
customer and utility sides generate reactive power. The lowest
, which is between the utility and
voltage point is at
customer but is still greater than half of . Accordingly,
and IET decrease to 56%. But we can still make correct
prediction if the tolerance for impedance error is tightened. In
conclusion, the robustness of the method can be described by
the following.
1) If one side generates reactive power while the other side
absorbs, the method has a large impedance error tolerance
and, therefore, is highly reliable.
2) If both sides generate reactive power, the error tolerance
will be smaller. However, the harmonic source can still
be detected correctly as long as our knowledge about the
total impedance has no larger errors than IET.
D. Generalized CI Method
Our discussion so far has assumed that the impedance between utility and customer is purely reactive. In real power systems, the impedance is usually in the form of
. For this
realistic case, we introduce a phase rotation to precondition the
problem. The general equation for the power received by the
utility source is as follows (Fig. 2):

Fig. 4. Voltage and reactive power profiles.

The transformed power has the form of

(16)
The above equation is identical to the pure reactance case. Consequently, all conclusions derived for the later case can be applied to the general case if , , and
are used. Note that a
new parameter is introduced here. The effect of its error will
be studied in the next section. In summary, the harmonic source
detection steps for general cases are as follows:
and
1. calculate utility voltage
;
, the customer side is the major harmonic
2. if
contributor;
, the following substeps are taken:
3. if
if
, the utility side is the main harmonic
contributor.
if
, the customer side is the main harmonic
contributor;
if
, no definite conclusion can be
drawn.
It is interesting to consider two special cases. One case is that
. This case may
the impedance is capacitive, namely
occur if the customer side is under light load condition or has
sufficient reactive power compensation. For this situation, the
reactive power absorbed by the utility source is

(14)

(17)

where
. Comparing (14) with those for the case
of pure reactance [(1) and (2)], one can see the difference is only
a rotation of degrees. Therefore, we introduce the following
rotation transformation matrix:

The above equation shows that if the utility side delivers reactive
power (
),
will hold. Hence, the conclusions for
the capacitive impedance case are just opposite to those of the
. In this case,
inductive case. The second special case is
is equal to the active power and
the transformed reactive
has the form of

(15)

(18)

LI et al.: A CRITICAL IMPEDANCE-BASED METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING HARMONIC SOURCES

Fig. 5. Performance of the CI method.

Fig. 6.

Impact of  error on CI (inductive Z case).

Fig. 7.

Impact of  error on CI (capacitive Z case).

675

In other words, the active power is a technically sound indictor

for harmonic source location for the cases where customer and
utility are connected with a resistive element. It should be noted,
however, that such a case rarely exists in a real power system.
III. SIMULATION STUDY RESULTS
The proposed method is verified in this section with a representative fictitious circuit given in [10]. The circuit parameters
are

A. Performance of the Method

Fig. 5 shows calculated CI while changes from 0 to 360 .
The active and reactive power received at utility side, the current
from
by applying superposition law
contribution to
and from
,
, are all plotted
[4],
in the figure. CI is found to be between
and
when is
is
selected as the actual value. It can be seen that
, which means the cusalways much greater than
tomer side is the major harmonic contributor. The figure shows
neither active nor reactive power direction can give the right
answer for all operating conditions. However, if we know the
impedance is reactive and its minimum magnitude is greater
than 6.1, we can get correct answer for all possible operation
is 43.4, the proposed method
conditions. Since the actual
has an IET of 86%. It means a correct answer can be obtained
has errors as high as 86%. This
even if our knowledge of
requirement is easy to meet for dominant harmonics.
B. Impact of Impedance Phase Variations
The accuracy of the method is also affected by the impedance
phase angle . Fig. 6 plots the CIs while has error from
to
at a step of 5 per curve. It is found that the minimum
and the method still has IET up to 84%.
CI changes to
These simulations have demonstrated that the method is robust
with respect to impedance errors.

The method can give a correct answer too when the total
impedance is capacitive. Fig. 7 shows the simulation results for
and when the error of varies
the case of
to 90 . Note that we need to check the range of
from
only when CI is positive. The maximum CI is calculated as 4.3.
for this case is 27.7, the method can tolerate
As the actual
error up to 84% even if the phase of has an error of
.
C. Robustness of the Method With Respect to Ratio of

to

In the above examples,

(106.1) is much greater than
(8.1). It is natural to deduce that the robustness of the method
could be aggravated while the harmonic current contributions
from utility and customer become comparable. Table I shows
the worst tolerance level on impedance error (IET) with respect
when decreases from 3 to 0.6. It can
to the error of
be seen that even if is reduced by 80% (from 3 to 0.6), the
method can still give right answers as long as our knowledge
and a magnitude
about has a phase angle error less then
error less than 40%. Alternatively, if we are confident that the

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IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 19, NO. 2, APRIL 2004

TABLE I
IMPACT OF HARMONIC MAGNITUDE ON ACCURACY OF CI METHOD

magnitude error of is less than 20%, the tolerance on phase

. In
angle error can be raised to 75 for the case of
conclusion, the proposed method is quite robust with respect
to impedance errors. In other words, the method can be implemented with very limited knowledge on the impedance data.
D. Robustness of the Method With Respect to Accuracy of
The last factor that may degrade the robustness of the CI
. This impedance
method is the error of the utility impedance
and can influence the range of . It should
is used to estimate
be noted that first of all, the error of
is generally small since
the supply transformer dominates the utility impedance. Even if
there are some errors in , the error can be regarded as changes
of and . Since results have shown that the method can tolerate large impedance and source current variations, it is reasonvariation is insignificant.
able to consider that the impact of
IV. VERIFICATION USING FIELD MEASUREMENTS
The proposed method is further assessed with field measurement data. The system, shown in Fig. 8, exhibits 5th harmonic
distortions at the metering point. Extensive investigations were
conducted to determine which side is the main contributor to
the harmonic distortion. Due to a lack of other viable harmonic
source detection techniques at the time of the project, the
expensive impedance-based method was used. The utility and
customer impedances were determined from a series of field
measurements when disturbances such as line and capacitor
switching were introduced to either side. At the utility side,
eight operations were performed within several hours to find
the customer-side harmonic impedance. The calculated average
. Another
5th harmonic impedance is around
two capacitor switching operations were performed at the
, the result
customer side to find the utility side impedance
. The system was also modeled for frequency
is
scan studies. The scanned
and
are found to be very
close to the measured ones. Eventually, the utility system was
identified as the main harmonic contributor with an average 5th
of 2160 V. The customer side source
is about
harmonic
858 V. The proposed method is applied to the ten snapshots
. The
with the assumption of
calculated CI and other key parameters are listed in Table II.
The following conclusions can be drawn from the table.
1) The CI is always negative, so the utility generates reactive
power (after rotation of degrees) in all snapshots. The
harmonic source location needs to be detected by com.
paring CI with impedance
2) The main harmonic source is located at the utility side
since
is always larger than
which is about 563 .
This impedance value is derived from the measured data.

Fig. 8.

One-line diagram of the field test system.

3) The smallest IET has a value of 58%. It means that one

can still detect the source correctly even if our knowledge
differs from the actual (i.e., measured) value by
about
58%.
4) The first three snapshots have smaller IET than others.
This is because both the utility and customer sides generate reactive power in these cases. For the other seven
cases, the utility side generates reactive power and the
customer side absorbs; consequently, the tolerance on
impedance error can go as high as 258%.
5) The active power produced by the utility source is equal
to that received by the customer source. This is because,
after the rotation transform, the power is assumed to
. There is no
transmit through a pure reactance of
active power consumption is the rotated case.
6) Further studies show that even if has an error from
to
, the location of the main harmonic source can
still be correctly detected.
This practical case further proves the robustness of the proposed
method. It is shown that the method requires only approximate
harmonic impedance data and can tolerate large impedance errors. Another advantage of the method is that once we find one
side absorbs reactive power (for example, the customer side of
snapshots 4 to 10), one can conclude that the main harmonic
source is located at the other side immediately without examining the magnitude of .
V. DISCUSSIONS
Our focus so far has been on determining which side has a
larger contribution to the PCC current distortion. It is equally
important to find out which source has more contribution to the
PCC voltage distortion. In fact, limiting the voltage distortions
has become more important in recent developments of harmonic
standards. In this section, the subject of applying the proposed
method to detect dominant source from the perspective of
voltage distortion is discussed.
The circuit for voltage distortion analysis is shown in Fig. 9.
The problem here is to find the larger contributor to the voltage
. According to the principle
harmonic measured at PCC,
of superposition, this is equivalent to finding which source or
has a larger magnitude. If we still assume that the utility side
is known, the utility side harmonic current
admittance
can be calculated from the PCC measurements. Consequently,

LI et al.: A CRITICAL IMPEDANCE-BASED METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING HARMONIC SOURCES

677

TABLE II
CALCULATION RESULTS OF THE TEN SNAPSHOTS

Note: the power direction is assumed to be sending for the utility

. So the rotation transform developed
where
in Section II can be used directly. The transforming matrix
is still (15). In conclusion, the reactive power consumption
concept developed in this paper can be used to detect major
harmonic source from the perspective of either PCC voltage
distortion or PCC current distortion.
VI. CONCLUSION
Fig. 9.

Equivalent circuit for voltage harmonic analysis.

the reactive power absorbed by the utility current source can be

determined as
(19)
where
. Referring to (2), we can see that if
,
the utility current source receives reactive power, one can conclude that the customer side has more contribution to
. If
or the utility current source generates reactive power, we
need to check how much admittance will completely absorb that
reactive power. Similarly, imagine the admittance is uniformly
and , follow the procedure (4)(7) and
distributed between
consider:
(20)
the point where

is the smallest can be determined as

(21)

where can be defined as the CA. The reactive power generated

by the utility current source will be absorbed by . It can be seen
that (21) has a similar structure as (7). By comparing with
, we can determine the dominant harmonic contributor to
. distortion. In other words, the conclusions developed
the
in the previous sections can be applied to detect the main voltage
harmonic contributor by replacing with and with . When
the conductance cannot be ignored, that is
, it is
easy to find

(22)

The widely known active power direction method for harmonic source detection is unfounded. A new reactive powerbased method is proposed in this paper. The method assumes
that the utility side impedance and the range of the customer
impedance are approximately known. A fictitious impedance
(or admittance) named CI (or CA) is calculated from voltage
and current measured at the PCC. The result is compared with
the range of the combined utility and customer impedance (or
admittance) to determine which side is the dominant contributor
to the harmonic distortion measured at the PCC. The main contributions of this work can be summarized as follows.
Mathematical analysis has been presented to demonstrate
the pros and cons of the power direction-based methods.
The reactive power direction-based method is found to be
technically sound and is reliable when one source absorbs
reactive power.
The reactive power-based method is expanded with the
concept of critical impedance (or admittance), which
forms the core idea of the proposed method. Rigorous
theoretical analysis has proven that the concept presents
a powerful alternative solution for the harmonic source
detection problem.
A rotation transform is introduced to deal with general
cases. This transform has greatly simplified the analysis
and understanding of the harmonic source detection
problem. The combination of these three contributions
has resulted in a useful, practical, and reasonably reliable
method for locating dominant harmonic sources in a
power system.
The paper has done extensive investigations on the error
characteristics of the proposed method. The method is further checked using field measurements. All results have
shown that the method is robust and practical. It has the
potential to become a viable and easy-to-use tool for the
harmonic source detection problem.

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Chun Li (S99M01) received the B.E. and Ph.D. degrees in electrical

engineering from Tsinghua University, Beijing, China, in 1996 and 2000,
respectively.
Currently, he is a Post-doctoral Fellow in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada. His
current interests are harmonics and power quality.

Wilsun Xu (M90SM95) received the Ph.D. degree from the University of

British Columbia, Vancouver, BC, Canada, in 1989.
Currently, he is a Professor with the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB,
Canada, and chairs the Harmonics Modeling and Simulation Task Force of the
IEEE Power Engineering Society. He was an Engineer with BC Hydro, BC,
Canada, from 1990 to 1996. His main research interests are power quality and
harmonics.

Thavatchai Tayjasanant (S01) received the B.Eng. degree in electrical power

engineering from Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, in 1994, and
the M.Sc. degree from the University of Manchester Institute of Science and
Technology (UMIST), Manchester, U.K., in 1996. He is currently pursuing the
Ph.D. degree at the University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB, Canada.