Designing Harmonic Filters for an Aluminum Smelting Plant

This paper presents the results of harmonic analysis and harmonic filter design for a grid connected aluminum smelting plant. Harmonic analysis studies are carried out to detect the system resonance frequencies and determine individual and total harmonic voltage distortion for a wide range of possible system operating conditions including scenarios with N-1 and N-2 generation, an outage of a harmonic filter, and an outage of a rectifier transformer. A conceptual harmonic filter design procedure for the filters required for the smelting plant is presented. The suitability and robustness of the proposed harmonic filter configuration in terms of the filter´s components current and voltage ratings, and corresponding r.m.s. values is investigated.