Power Quality Evaluation and Improvement in Electric Arc Furnace using UPQC

Electric arc furnaces (EAFs) have become more popular for producing steel due to the rising demand for high-quality steel, the chaotic nature of EAF process contributes significantly for the degradation of power quality due to injection of harmonics and voltage fluctuations emphasizing the need of compensators to suppress the PQ distortions. This paper attempts to develop and simulate the mathematical model of an EAF using Cassie-Mayr method for evaluation of harmonic and voltage fluctuations and proposes the shunt active series filter, series active power filter and Unified power quality conditioner for suppression of current harmonic, voltage harmonics and overall PQ distortions. The simulations are carried out using Simulink, the results obtained justifies the performance of proposed UPQC resulting in reduction of voltage and current harmonics from 20.5 and 54% to 2.39% and 2.4% respectively.