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Kultur Dokumente
Documented Case
N. Eghtedarpour M.A. Karimi
Technical office, deputy of transmission M. Tavakoli
Fars regional electric co. Technical office, deputy of transmission
Shiraz, Iran Fars regional electric co.
eghtedarpour@frec.co.ir Shiraz, Iran
Abstract— Harmonic resonance occurs in a power system when On August 18, 2013 the Fars power grid experienced an
the power system natural frequency corresponds to the outage of capacitor bank in a sub-transmission 63/20 kV
frequency of a source of harmonic current. This paper studies a substation located in Shiraz suburb. The outage was due to the
real case of power system harmonic resonance that resulted in blow of the capacitor fuse link. However, after the complete
failure of 20-kV capacitor bank fuses. The load current investigation of the capacitors and test performance there was
harmonics are measured and analyzed to investigate the no evidence of failure on capacitor units. The possibility that
individual harmonics of the current and then by using the harmonic resonance had been the cause was considered since
system impedance frequency characteristic, the voltage one of the loads on this substation is a steel rolling factory.
harmonic distortion and the corresponding capacitor current
This paper studies the cause of capacitor fuse blowing in the
are determined. Calculation of the power system natural
above-mentioned substation. The load current harmonics is
frequencies are given for various configurations of system shunt
capacitance and results of the power system harmonic current measured and analyzed to investigate the individual harmonics
and voltage on the capacitor fuse blown is studied. The paper of the current and then by using the system impedance
proposes a criterion for the proper size of capacitor to put in frequency characteristic, the voltage harmonic distortion and
service according to system frequency characteristic and current the corresponding capacitor current are determined. The fuse
harmonics. thermal model is then used to realize the cause of fuse blown.
Measuring and simulation results show that capacitor
Index Terms-- harmonic resonance, system impedance installation has caused a parallel resonance between 5th and
frequency response, harmonc load flow, capacitor fuse. 6th harmonics and due to a relatively high 5th order harmonic
current, the voltage distortion on 5th harmonic has been
I. INTRODUCTION occurred. Since the capacitor impedance is smaller for higher
frequency the voltage harmonics causes large amount of
Shunt capacitors have been utilized for voltage support and harmonic current to the capacitor and finally thermal
power factor correction as a common practice in the electric instability in the fuse.
power grids. Every power system has a natural frequency that
The paper is organized as follows. In Section II the effect
is a function of the system reactance and the amount of power
of capacitor bank on the impedance frequency characteristic of
factor correction capacitors connected to the system [1].
the power system and the corresponding harmonic resonance
Therefore, the installation of shunt capacitors can result in
is described. Section III explains the system configuration and
harmonic resonance and cause an increase in the system
the frequency sweep studies for different capacitor topology is
impedance at the corresponding frequency. In the case that a
illustrated in Section IV. Resonance analysis and harmonic
source of excitation; such as harmonic currents of nonlinear
measurement results are describe in Sections V and VI,
loads exists with a frequency near or equal to the system
respectively. A criterion also proposed in Section VII for
natural frequency, large harmonic voltage distortions can
capacitor installation considering the load current harmonic
result due to the occurrence of resonant conditions. With the
distortion. Finally, Section VIII concludes the paper.
increasing spread of harmonic-producing loads such as motor
drives, power electronic converters, electric arc furnaces, …
the possibility of parallel resonance due to shunt capacitors II. CAPACITOR BANK AND HARMONIC RESONANCE
has become a routine concern for capacitor applications [2]- In a parallel resonant circuit the inductive reactance and
[5]. The problems associated with the parallel resonance are capacitive reactance impedance components are in parallel to
typical of harmonic related heating, including blown fuses, a source of harmonic current. At this frequency where the
circuit breaker heating, and unexplained general equipment inductive and capacitive reactances are equal, harmonic
failures. resonance occurs and the total effective impedance can be
The authors are with Fars regional electric company, Shiraz, Iran
(e-mail: eghtedarpour@frec.co.ir)
857
very high (parallel resonance) depending on the system III. SYSTEM CONFIGURATION
configuration and loading [1], [5]. Shunt capacitors which are
commonly installed on the low voltage bus of the sub- A single line diagram of the studied power substation is
transmission substations, are widely used for voltage support shown in Fig. 2. The system has 63 kV and 20 kV Bus. The
as well as power factor correction. Installation of capacitor utility supplies power via two 40 MVA wye-grounded/delta
affect directly to resonance frequency of the system and winding transformer. The transformers are also equipped with
sometimes may contribute to harmonic resonance problem. two 1200 A earthing transformers. Four 2.4 MVAR fixed
shunt capacitors are installed on the 20 kV Bus that are to be
Fig. 1 shows the Thevenin equivalent circuit of a power varied from 2.4 to 9.6 MVAR. A harmonic producing load in
system at the capacitor location. Eth and Z th are the open- this figure is a steel rolling factory which is modeled as
circuit system voltage and the Thevenin equivalent constant current source. The system fault level at 20 kV Bus is
impedance, respectively. Z th is obtained by frequency scan 305 MVA.
study [6]. Parallel resonance occurs when the reactance of X C
IV. RESONANCE ANALYSIS
and Z th cancel each other out. That can be expressed as
follows [1]: A well-known and commonly used method to verify if a
capacitor resonates with its supply system is to determine the
2
ratio of the system fault level to the capacitor size [6] and the
1 1 Rth 1 1
f p ,res. = − ≈ (1) resonance frequency can be estimated from this ratio as
2π Lth C 4 L2th 2π Lth C follows,
S s.c.
hres = (5)
Z th = Rth + j hωLth S cap
−j
hωC ( jhωLth + Rth ) (hωLth ) 2
Z p ,res. = ≈ (2) Harmonic
Rth Rth producing
2.4 2.4 loads 2.4 2.4
Since in transmission systems Rth << ω Lth , Z p,res. will MVAR MVAR MVAR MVAR
858
average RMS value of the feeder current for one typical
200
workday is shown in Fig. 4 The measured current maximum
180 6.3,170.5 Ω
7.7,178 Ω individual harmonic contents are shown in Fig. 5 for
160
5.5,137 Ω 10.7,143 Ω harmonics order up to 9th.
Impedance (Ohm)
859
90
80
70
60
50
40
FHLF 30
20
10
0
0 50 100 150 200 250 300 350 400 450
Frequency (Hz)
t
Ploss Ih
n
Ploss
= ¦ FHLF ⋅
I1
= 3.2 (9)
n
where, Ploss is the nominal fuse loss power which causes fuse
melting.
Therefore, the total loss power in the fuse according to the
current distortion is 3.2 times the loss power of the
fundamental current. Each 2.4 MVAR of capacitor bank
consists of 12 units of 200 KVAR capacitors that are protected
(b) partially by expulsion fuses with rated current of 50 A. The
time-current characteristic of the fuse is shown in Fig. 8. It can
Fig. 5 measured current maximum individual harmonic contents in
typical workday, (a) even harmonics, (b) odd harmonics be seen that the fuse will blow after 15 sec for the current of
3.2 I n . Therefore, for the time in which the current distortion
is larger it is highly possible for the fuse to start melting.
TABLE I. CURRENT DISTORTION LIMITS
Clearing
Meltingtime
time(Sec.)
(sec)
Maximum current harmonic distortion in percent of
0.01 0.1 1 10 100 1000
maximum demand current (IL)
0
Size of Individual harmonic order n
THD
customer 1 10 100
n<11 11<n<17 17<n<23 23<n<35 n>35 5,000 0
odd even odd even odd even odd even odd even 50
Current (Amps.)
10,000 100
IL/Isc<0.1 15 3.8 7 1.7 6 1.5 2.5 0.6 1.4 0.3 20
150
15,000
200
25,000
5
4 Fig. 8 Fuse melting characteristic
3
2
1.0
VII. A CRITERION FOR MODIFYING CAPACITOR
1
0.1 0.0 0.2 0.0 0.1 0.0
INSTALLATION
0
2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 It has been discussed in the previous sections that due to
Ha rmonic order the high current harmonic distortion near the resonance point,
Fig. 6 The resulted harmonic voltage distortion due to load current harmonics the problem of fuse blowing occurred in the substation.
Different methods have been proposed to mitigate this
The capacitor current passes through the fuse, in which the problem by modifying the system impedance frequency
t characteristic. One of the mostly used methods is to change
total loss power ( Ploss ) due to the voltage distortion and the the capacitor size or to move a portion to a different location.
corresponding harmonic currents would be, This section proposes a criterion to study the proper capacitor
size according to current harmonic distortion limits defined by
the standard.
860
Using the FHLF and Eq. (3), loss power of the fuse for
different load current harmonic distortion can be expressed by, 3
Load HDi5
Standard limit
2.5
h
Ploss (Cω h) Z hp Ih 2
= FHLF ⋅ Id Qc=9.6 Mvar
5
1 I fuse
Ploss 1.5
Qc=7.2 Mvar
Ploss 1
Ploss Qc=4.8 Mvar
HDih Nocapacitor
demand current, I fuse is the fuse nominal current and HDih is (a)
th
the h current harmonic distortion. Fig. 9 (a) and (b) show the 8
Load HDi5
Standard limit
fuse loss power relative to the nominal loss power for 5th and 7
Qc=7.2 Mvar
1 4
9.6 MVAR capacitor can result in fuse blown. On the other Ploss
Qc=4.8 Mvar
3
hand, for HDi7 since the resonance occurs for smaller size of
Qc=2.4 Mvar
2 Nocapacitor
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