Various Custom Power Devices for Power Quality Improvement: A Review

Power electronic devices form a major part in today’s industrial and household applications. However, the power quality of these devices is highly degraded due to lot of reasons including voltage fluctuation and flicker, harmonics, transients, voltage imbalance, and many more. These voltage disturbances lead to maximum failures in electrical distribution systems. In this review paper, various techniques including both network reconfiguring and compensating type devices are discussed to ameliorate the power quality in the distribution systems. Various power quality issues and their characteristics have been depicted. Some of the techniques discussed to improve the power quality in distribution systems which include filters, unified power quality conditioner (UPQC), dynamic voltage restorer (DVR), and distribution static synchronous compensator (D-STATCOM). The design parameters and implementation of these techniques in electrical machines are also discussed.