A Hybrid Approach for Optimal Sizing of Inverter-Based Distributed Generation Unit in Presence of Harmonic Distortion Limit

This paper presents a hybrid approach to calculate the optimal size of inverter-based distributed generation unit located at any given bus of a radial distribution network to minimize the active power loss in the network in presence of limit imposed on the maximum allowable value of total harmonic distortion in bus voltages. The suggested approach combines efficient iterative computations with a rule base developed in the present work, and requires much less computation compared to the evolutionary population based methods reported so far, to reach the desired solution. In support of this claim, the proposed methodology was tested on two bench-mark distribution test systems, and the test results were compared and validated with those obtained using Particle Swarm Optimization technique. PSO has been chosen for comparison as it is one of the most widely used among the evolutionary population based methods due to its simple approach, ease of implementation, and also because of its superiority in terms of precision, robustness and speed of convergence. From the comparative results it has been established that the proposed method can provide solution for the problem undertaken in this work with significantly less computation than is required by the evolutionary computation based methods.