On Real-Time Simulation for Harmonic and Flicker Assessment of an Industrial System With Bulk Nonlinear Loads

This paper presents application experiences of real-time simulation (RTS) techniques for harmonic and flicker studies of an industrial power system, where the system and nonlinear loads are properly modeled. A PC-cluster-based real-time parallel simulator is implemented under MATLAB/SIMULINK, where the studied system consists of an ac electric arc furnace, dc and ac motor-drive loads, and the static var compensator. Guidelines for model partition of the studied system and the solver settings under an RTS environment are reported. In addition, the most commonly used offline simulation with variable-step solver and the actual field measurements are included for comparison. Results indicate that the RTS achieves satisfactory solution accuracy within much less execution time and can be applied for more complicated studies such as installing new nonlinear loads with different levels of model complexities or designing/tuning mitigation devices of power-quality disturbances, where the repeated time-consuming analysis is required.