Characterization and software application for a probabilistic evaluation of harmonics in electric power distribution systems

This paper presents the results of the characterization of 19 industrial customer's measurements of harmonics in their distribution system of medium voltage level, jointly with a software application to carry out a probabilistic evaluation of levels of distortion of currents and harmonic voltages on their systems. The developed program is based on Monte Carlo's simulation technique and it was tested on a distribution feeder circuit. The most important results of this work are the following: A dominant behavior of the harmonic order 3, 5, 7 and 11 was found both in current and in voltage; correlation factors for the magnitudes of the harmonic currents for the three phases is nearly 1; there is a significant presence of multimodal probability density functions in all the analyzed data; with more realistic simulation scenarios the average of Total Harmonic Distortion THD v and THD i indicators are reduced, but standard deviations are increased.