Practical considerations for reactive power sharing approaches among multiple-arm passive filters in non-sinusoidal power systems

Shunt passive filters are considered as the most reliable and economical tool for power factor improvement and harmonic suppression. Many mathematical techniques have been developed in the literature for reactive power division among multiple passive filter arms, taking into consideration different techno-economic aspects. In this paper, firstly, a comprehensive overview of all reactive power-sharing approaches among multiple-arm passive filters was presented. The eight presented approaches cover all of the former and recent industrial and research methods. Secondly, this article presented a new method of multiple-arm passive filter design based on the crow search algorithm (CSA) to minimize the total harmonic current distortion (THDI) as an objective function for an industrial plant. The simulated system was modeled through Matlab and the results are compared with eight conventional techniques with respect to the technical aspects such as filter efficiency, harmonic distortion levels, filter failure, interaction with the system, and filter cost to determine the most efficient design technique. Simulations are carried out in ETAP and Matlab environments. The simulation results obtained show the disadvantages of the traditional design methods and the advantage of the proposed solution among the other methods.