Effects of Source Voltage Harmonic Distortion on Power Factor Compensation in Triac Controlled AC Chopper Circuits

In recent years, detailed modeling of power electronic devices and their behavior on different system conditions are a great concern of the power industries and customers. One of the widely proliferated such devices is the triac controlled ac choppers. Although these types of devices have important application areas, their poor power factor performance is the main obstacle for the large scale implementation in power systems. This paper presents an analysis on the behaviour of a single phase load composed with triac controlled ac chopper during reactive power compensation under nonsinusoidal voltage. The results of these analysis shows that for high conduction angle distortion on the source voltage improve the power factor which is contradicting with the previous findings. In addition, it is observed that, performance of power factor compensation systems are heavily affected by source voltage harmonics phase angles which are ignored in existing literature.