Power Quality Improvement in a Hybrid Microgrid Using Passive Harmonic Filtering and PLC-Based Energy Management

Authors:

Priya A. Kadam, Kshitij Y. Kachure, Swaraj B. Yadav, Yash B. Kumbhar, Jagdish H. Pawar

Department of Electrical Engineering

Shivnagar Vidya Prasarak Mandal’s College of Engineering, Malegaon (Bk), Baramati, Maharashtra, India Email: priyakadam8516@gmail.com, kshitijkachure@gmail.com, swarajyadav55@gmail.com, yashkumbhar1013@gmail.com, jhpawar@engg.svpm.org

Abstract—The increasing presence of nonlinear loads and distributed energy resources interfaced with converters has increased the power quality problems such as waveform degra-dation, harmonic distortion, and decreased operational efficiency. In this paper, a hybrid microgrid scheme with renewable energy source integration, backup energy source, passive harmonic filtering, and energy management using PLC technology has been proposed. The system has been designed with an objective to provide uninterrupted supply to critical loads with acceptable voltage and current waveforms. The proposed system has been modeled in MATLAB/Simulink along with its loads, measure-ments, and passive harmonic filter. Fast Fourier transform has been performed to analyze the harmonic distortion and total harmonic distortion in the presence and absence of the passive filter. Moreover, PLC-based source control and load scheduling technique has been applied to the proposed hybrid microgrid model to increase system reliability. It has been observed from simulation results that there is reduction of THD in the source current from 5.20% to 0.18%. Thus, the use of passive harmonic filter and energy management strategy using PLC technique provides economical and reliable alternative for small hybrid microgrids.

Index Terms—hybrid micro-grid, quality of power, mitigation of harmonics, passive filters, PLC, Matlab-Simulink, total har-monic distortion, FFT.