A Comparison between SVC and STATCOM in Flicker Mitigation of Electric Arc Furnace using Practical Recorded Data

Electric arc furnace (EAF) is one of the largest loads in electric power systems. It is highly time varying and nonlinear. Its reactive power variations cause voltage fluctuations in nearby system which is known as flicker. On the other hand the nonlinear voltage-current characteristic causes strong voltage and current harmonics in EAF. To this end Flexible AC Transmission Systems (FACTS) technologies are used to mitigate the flicker and harmonics caused by EAF. The mostly used FACTS device in EAFs is Static VAr compensator (SVC) which can reduce the flicker and harmonics to some levels. Delays relevant to reactive power measurement and thyristor ignition reduce compensation capabilities of SVC. In order to prevent these delays, one can use faster compensation devices. Static Synchronous Compensator (STATCOM) may be considered as a high performance candidate for this purpose due to its fast and flexible response. In this article the performance of STATCOM is compared to SVC in EAFs plants. For this purpose the system is simulated with SVC and STATCOM in PSCAD/EMTDC using the practical EAF data records.  Data records are the instantaneous EAF voltage and current recorded from EAFs in Mobarakeh steel company in Esfahan/Iran.