Impact of flat-top voltage waveform distortion on harmonic current emission and summation of electronic household appliances

Abstract

Electronic household appliances are non-linear loads and emit harmonics into the low voltage networks. Usually, these loads are simply modelled by constant current source models, which only represent the harmonic emission of the appliances for a single supply voltage distortion, mostly sinusoidal conditions. Measurements have shown that the harmonic currents emitted by electronic devices can significantly depend on the circuit topology and the existing supply voltage distortion. This paper studies the impact of supply voltage distortion, which can be typically found in public low voltage networks (so-called flat-top voltage waveform), on the harmonic current emission of individual devices with different circuit topologies as well as the impact of supply voltage distortion on the harmonic summation of these devices.