A New Model of Electric Arc Furnace Based on Actual Measurements for Power Quality Studies

Electric arc furnaces are nonlinear and time variant loads that cause high fluctuations of current, voltage and current harmonics, voltage flicker, frequency variations, and so on. On the other hand, these furnaces are the huge energy consumer in power networks. Therefore, it is necessary to present a precise and actual model for analyzing the performance of these loads so that power quality studies, design of reactive power compensators and analysis of the effects of these loads on electric arc furnaces can be done correctly. In this paper, a new model for electric arc furnaces is proposed based on actual measurements of Mobarakeh steel company’s arc furnaces. This model considers the effects of all elements of arc furnaces, such as the effects of voltage and current transformers, flexible cables, and furnace transformers for modeling. In this way, this model is capable of generating various power quality parameters and can be very useful in the accurate design of reactive power compensators for arc furnaces. The proposed model is compared with one of the most commonly used models, called Cassie-Mayer. The results of the comparison show the accuracy and validity of the proposed model.