IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 19, NO.
2, APRIL 2004
A “Critical Impedance”-Based Method
for Identifying Harmonic Sources
Chun Li, Member, IEEE, Wilsun Xu, Senior Member, IEEE, and Thavatchai Tayjasanant, Student Member, IEEE
Abstract—This paper proposes a new method to determine
whether the utility or the customer side has more contribution
to the harmonic currents measured at the point of common
coupling. The method is inspired by the observation that the
direction of harmonic reactive power, instead of active power, is
a more reliable indicator on the location of dominant harmonic
sources. The method needs approximate impedance information
to operate. Mathematical analysis, simulation studies, and field
measurements have shown that this is a useful, reliable, and
practical solution for the harmonic source detection problem.
Index Terms—Harmonic source detection, harmonics, power
quality.
I. INTRODUCTION
I DENTIFICATION of harmonic sources in a power system
has been a challenging task for many years. The most
common tool to solve this problem is the harmonic power
direction-based method [1]–[3]. In this method, if harmonic
active power flows from utility to customer, the utility is
considered as the dominant harmonic generator, and vice versa.
Unfortunately, [4] and [5] have proven that this qualitative
method is theoretically unreliable. Another group of practical
methods for harmonic source detection is to measure the utility
and customer harmonic impedances and then calculate the har-
monic sources behind the impedances. There are a number of
variations of this method [6]–[9]. Although this type of method
is theoretically sound, it is very difficult to implement. The
main problem is that the impedances can only be determined
with the help of disturbances. Such disturbances are not readily
available from the system or are expensive to generate with
intrusive means.
During the course of investigating the problems of the ac-
tive power direction method, the authors have found that the
reactive power direction is actually a more reliable indicator
on the location of dominant harmonic source. But the induc-
tive or capacitive characteristic of the combined utility and cus-
tomer impedance affects the direction of reactive power. If one
knows the approximate range of the impedance, however, it is
possible to develop a practical and reliable method for harmonic
source detection. The objective of this paper is to present such
a method. The key idea of this method can be summarized as
Manuscript received October 4, 2001; revised May 10, 2002. This work
was supported by a grant from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research
Council of Canada (NSERC).
The authors are with the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department,
University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2G7 Canada.
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPWRD.2004.825302
0885-8977/04$20.00 © 2004 IEEE
671
follows. The harmonic reactive power generated by the utility
source is estimated first. An equivalent impedance (or admit-
tance) that absorbs that reactive power is then determined. This
impedance (or admittance) is termed as critical impedance (or
admittance) (CI or CA). By comparing the CI (or CA) with the
known range of the combined utility and customer impedance
(or admittance), the location of the dominant harmonic source
can be found. The method, therefore, takes advantage of both
the power direction-based and the impedance-based methods.
In this paper, the validity of the method is demonstrated with
theoretical analysis. The method is also verified using computer
simulations and field test results.
This paper is organized as follows: Section II describes the
principle of the method, Section III presents simulation as well
as error analysis results, and Section IV applies the method to
a real power system. Section V discusses an extension of the
method. The paper concludes with Section VI.
II. PRINCIPLE OF THE PROPOSED METHOD
If the current harmonic pollution is mainly concerned, the
problem of harmonic source detection is to determine which
side–utility or customer–is the dominant contributor to the
harmonic current measured at the point of common coupling
(PCC). For this problem, it is common to assume that the
utility and customer sides are represented by their respective
Norton equivalent circuits as shown in Fig. 1 [8], [9]. In this
figure, and are the customer and utility harmonic current
sources, and and are the customer and utility harmonic
impedances, respectively. The problem of harmonic source
detection is to determine if or has a larger contribution
to the PCC harmonic current . As analyzed in [4], this is
theoretically equivalent to examining the magnitude of
and . If is greater than , it can be shown
that the utility side source contributes more to , and vice
versa. Therefore, we can transform the Norton circuit into the
Thevenin equivalent circuit as shown in Fig. 2. In this figure,
, , and . The phase
angle of is set to zero and that of is denoted as . The
harmonic source detection problem now becomes to identify
which voltage source or has a higher magnitude.
A. Problems of Power Direction Method
Since the proposed method is inspired by the active power
direction method, it is worthwhile to examine the problems as-
sociated with the method. For simplicity, the case of
is used. Following the classic power-angle equation, for two
672
Fig. 1. Norton equivalent circuit.
Fig. 2. Thevenin equivalent circuit.
source ac circuits, the power flowing into source can be de-
termined as
(1)
Note that is the phase angle difference between customer and
utility side voltage sources. The significance of this equation is
that the direction of active power is a function of instead of the
magnitudes of the voltage sources. As a result, the active power
direction-based harmonic source detection method is incorrect
theoretically, as it cannot reveal the difference between the mag-
nitudes of the two sources.
It is common knowledge for power engineers that the phase
angles of bus voltages mainly affect the flow of active power
while the magnitudes of bus voltages mainly affect the flow of
reactive power. One would therefore wonder if the direction of
reactive power could indicate the relative magnitudes of two
harmonic sources. This can be analyzed by examining the re-
active power flowing into source
(2)
It shows that the direction of reactive power is indeed related
to the voltage magnitudes. From the equation, if the utility side
absorbs reactive power ( ), must be smaller than .
In other words, one can conclude that the customer side has a
larger contribution to . An intuitive explanation of this con-
clusion is the following: the reactive power absorbed by
must come from . Since the impedance is reactive, must
have a sufficiently high magnitude in order to “push” the reac-
tive power into source . If the utility side generates reactive
power ( ), however, it does not necessarily imply that the
utility side is the dominant source. This is because the gener-
ated reactive power may not reach the customer side since the
line absorbs reactive power. In any case, anyhow, at least one di-
rection of reactive power can give a theoretically correct conclu-
sion, which is an improvement over the unfounded active power
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 19, NO. 2, APRIL 2004
direction method. In the next section, we will propose a method
to address the case of .
It should be noted that an important prerequisite for the above
reactive power direction method is and . This
condition is generally true at the fundamental frequency, but it
is unlikely true at the harmonic frequencies. A solution to this
problem will be presented in Section II–D.
B. Proposed Reactive Power-Based Method
The proposed new method is based on the concept of reactive
power flow and is conceived to address the case of . The
method relies on the following two assumptions.
• The utility side impedance is approximately known.
This requirement is relatively easier to meet since the
impedance of the step-down transformer generally dom-
inates the system impedance and the system impedance
varies little for distribution systems. The fact that
low-order harmonics (5th to 13th) are those encountered
in most troubleshooting studies also helps to estimate
the range of the system impedance. Our experiences
show that frequency scan studies on a properly devel-
oped system model will generally yield an acceptable
range of the impedance. It should be noted, however, the
above conclusion may not be applicable to transmission
systems. The impedance could also be measured [6]–[8].
• The approximate range of the customer side impedance
is known. The customer loads may change a lot and there
are difficulties to determine their representative harmonic
impedances. It is possible, however, to estimate the range
of the impedance using frequency scan analysis on a simu-
lation model of the customer plant. For a plant dominated
with motors and drives, the frequency scan results could
be sufficient. Field measurements could also be conducted
to determine the typical values of the impedance.
The objective here is to develop a robust method to determine
the relative magnitude of and given the above conditions.
The method should be able to provide correct answers even if
the range of the combined utility and customer impedance (
) is very large. Since correct conclusions can be drawn
for the case of utility side absorbing reactive power ( ), we
need to focus on the cases where reactive power is generated by
utility source only. Based on the condition of a known and
starting with the simplest case of , the
utility source can be determined as
(3)
The impact of error will be analyzed later. The key idea
of the proposed method is to find how far the reactive power
generated by source can travel along the impedance , if
we imagine that the impedance is uniformly distributed between
and as an “impedance line.” With this consideration, the
voltage at an arbitrary point along the “impedance line” can
be determined as (Fig. 3)
(4)
LI et al.: A “CRITICAL IMPEDANCE”-BASED METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING HARMONIC SOURCES 673

where . By letting , we can

find the point with the lowest voltage as

(5)

where is the reactance from to the lowest voltage point. If

we consider (2) and

(6)
Fig. 3. Determination of voltage at one point along jX .
Equation (5) can be rewritten as
them into a single index. The new index is called CI and is de-
(7) fined as
Since the reactive power absorbed by is , which is equal (12)
to according to (7), one can conclude that all reactive power
produced by is absorbed by reactance . In other words, where is the reactive power absorbed by , as shown in
is the furthest location where the reactive power output of Fig. 2. Note that CI and have the same signs. So if ,
can flow to. This location also has the lowest voltage along the which implies the utility absorbs reactive power, we can con-
“impedance line” between and . clude directly that the customer side is the dominant harmonic
It is our postulation that if is located closer to the customer source. If , the utility side generates reactive power. In
side ( ), the utility source is expected to have a larger this case, the range of needs to be compared with the absolute
magnitude since the source can “push” its reactive power output value of CI for determining the dominant source. In summary,
beyond halfway ( ) of the “impedance line.” Similarly, if for the case of , the proposed method can be imple-
or is located closer to the utility side, the customer mented as follows.
source is expected to have a large magnitude. A method to deter- 1. Calculate the utility side voltage source by using
mine the relative magnitude of the two sources can, therefore, be , where is known.
established on the basis of comparing the magnitudes of and 2. Calculate the reactive power absorbed by ,
. Mathematical analysis has shown that this postulation is , where is the phase by which leads
correct. In the following, the criterion or will .
be proven to be the necessary and sufficient condition on which 3. Calculate .
one can conclude . 4. If , the utility source absorbs reactive power, the
To prove the above postulation, let us assume customer side is the main harmonic contributor.
where . By considering (5), the new expression for can 5. If , the utility generates reactive power, the fol-
be established as lowing substeps are to be taken:
If , where is the maximum of all pos-
(8) sible values, the utility side is the main harmonic contributor.
This is because the utility side, due to its high source voltage,
The minimum value of is obtained when can “push” its generated reactive power far deep into the cus-
tomer side;
If , where is the minimum of all pos-
(9) sible values, the customer side is the main harmonic contrib-
The above equation indicates that if , all possible utor. This case implies that the customer side source “pushes”
values of will be greater than . That is, is the its reactive power deep into the utility side.
necessary condition for to hold. On the other hand, if If , no definite conclusion can
given , one will get be drawn. But our study results show that such a condition
generally implies that the utility and customer have comparable
contributions to the PCC current. As a result, the exercise to
(10)
determine precisely which side has more contribution may just
have academic significance.
Straightforwardly, the condition for the above equation to hold
is . Therefore, we have proven C. Error Analysis
(11) The practical applicability of the CI method depends on
its robustness. Since the customer impedance may have large
Since the sign of the reactive power absorbed by source and variations, our knowledge about may have large errors. The
the quantity are two important parameters for the proposed method is expected to have a good tolerance to such errors.
method, we introduce a signed fictitious impedance to combine For example, if or , a conclusion can be
674 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 19, NO. 2, APRIL 2004

obtained reliably. If , however, it will be difficult to

judge which side is the main harmonic contributor. To quantify
the impact of impedance errors, we define an impedance error
tolerance index (IET) as

(13)

where is the true value of . A larger IET implies a more

reliable answer. The index IET is found to depend on the system
operation condition characterized by and . Fig. 4 shows
the voltage magnitude and the reactive power flowing along the
“impedance line” for the case of , , and
. is positive if reactive power flows from customer to utility.
It can be seen that when is in phase with , the utility side
generates reactive power while the customer side absorbs. The
lowest voltage point, shown by the dotted line, is at and
is beyond the total reactance . Accordingly, is 15 (
) and IET reaches 200%. This means that we can identify
the harmonic source correctly even if our knowledge on has
an error up to 200%. When leads by 150 , both the
customer and utility sides generate reactive power. The lowest
voltage point is at , which is between the utility and
customer but is still greater than half of . Accordingly,
and IET decrease to 56%. But we can still make correct
prediction if the tolerance for impedance error is tightened. In
conclusion, the robustness of the method can be described by
the following.
1) If one side generates reactive power while the other side
absorbs, the method has a large impedance error tolerance
and, therefore, is highly reliable.
2) If both sides generate reactive power, the error tolerance
will be smaller. However, the harmonic source can still
be detected correctly as long as our knowledge about the
total impedance has no larger errors than IET.
D. Generalized CI Method
Our discussion so far has assumed that the impedance be-
tween utility and customer is purely reactive. In real power sys-
tems, the impedance is usually in the form of . For this
realistic case, we introduce a phase rotation to precondition the
problem. The general equation for the power received by the
utility source is as follows (Fig. 2):
Fig. 4. Voltage and reactive power profiles.
The transformed power has the form of
(16)
The above equation is identical to the pure reactance case. Con-
sequently, all conclusions derived for the later case can be ap-
plied to the general case if , , and are used. Note that a
new parameter is introduced here. The effect of its error will
be studied in the next section. In summary, the harmonic source
detection steps for general cases are as follows:
1. calculate utility voltage and
;
2. if , the customer side is the major harmonic
contributor;
3. if , the following substeps are taken:
if , the utility side is the main harmonic
contributor.
if , the customer side is the main harmonic
contributor;
if , no definite conclusion can be
drawn.
It is interesting to consider two special cases. One case is that
the impedance is capacitive, namely . This case may
occur if the customer side is under light load condition or has
sufficient reactive power compensation. For this situation, the
reactive power absorbed by the utility source is

(14) (17)

The above equation shows that if the utility side delivers reactive
where . Comparing (14) with those for the case power ( ), will hold. Hence, the conclusions for
of pure reactance [(1) and (2)], one can see the difference is only the capacitive impedance case are just opposite to those of the
a rotation of degrees. Therefore, we introduce the following inductive case. The second special case is . In this case,
rotation transformation matrix: the transformed reactive is equal to the active power and
has the form of

(15) (18)
LI et al.: A “CRITICAL IMPEDANCE”-BASED METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING HARMONIC SOURCES 675

Fig. 5. Performance of the CI method. Fig. 6. Impact of  error on CI (inductive Z case).

In other words, the active power is a technically sound indictor

for harmonic source location for the cases where customer and
utility are connected with a resistive element. It should be noted,
however, that such a case rarely exists in a real power system.

III. SIMULATION STUDY RESULTS

The proposed method is verified in this section with a repre-
sentative fictitious circuit given in [10]. The circuit parameters
are

A. Performance of the Method

Fig. 5 shows calculated CI while changes from 0 to 360 .
The active and reactive power received at utility side, the current
contribution to from by applying superposition law
[4], and from , , are all plotted
in the figure. CI is found to be between and when is
selected as the actual value. It can be seen that
always much greater than , which means the cus-
tomer side is the major harmonic contributor. The figure shows
neither active nor reactive power direction can give the right
answer for all operating conditions. However, if we know the
impedance is reactive and its minimum magnitude is greater
than 6.1, we can get correct answer for all possible operation
conditions. Since the actual is 43.4, the proposed method
has an IET of 86%. It means a correct answer can be obtained
even if our knowledge of has errors as high as 86%. This
requirement is easy to meet for dominant harmonics.
B. Impact of Impedance Phase Variations
The accuracy of the method is also affected by the impedance
phase angle . Fig. 6 plots the CIs while has error from
to at a step of 5 per curve. It is found that the minimum
CI changes to and the method still has IET up to 84%.
These simulations have demonstrated that the method is robust
with respect to impedance errors.
Fig. 7. Impact of  error on CI (capacitive Z case).
is The method can give a correct answer too when the total
impedance is capacitive. Fig. 7 shows the simulation results for
the case of and when the error of varies
from to 90 . Note that we need to check the range of
only when CI is positive. The maximum CI is calculated as 4.3.
As the actual for this case is 27.7, the method can tolerate
error up to 84% even if the phase of has an error of .
C. Robustness of the Method With Respect to Ratio of to
In the above examples, (106.1) is much greater than
(8.1). It is natural to deduce that the robustness of the method
could be aggravated while the harmonic current contributions
from utility and customer become comparable. Table I shows
the worst tolerance level on impedance error (IET) with respect
to the error of when decreases from 3 to 0.6. It can
be seen that even if is reduced by 80% (from 3 to 0.6), the
method can still give right answers as long as our knowledge
about has a phase angle error less then and a magnitude
error less than 40%. Alternatively, if we are confident that the
676
TABLE I
IMPACT OF HARMONIC MAGNITUDE ON ACCURACY OF CI METHOD
magnitude error of is less than 20%, the tolerance on phase
angle error can be raised to 75 for the case of . In
conclusion, the proposed method is quite robust with respect
to impedance errors. In other words, the method can be imple-
mented with very limited knowledge on the impedance data.
D. Robustness of the Method With Respect to Accuracy of
The last factor that may degrade the robustness of the CI
method is the error of the utility impedance . This impedance
is used to estimate and can influence the range of . It should
be noted that first of all, the error of is generally small since
the supply transformer dominates the utility impedance. Even if
there are some errors in , the error can be regarded as changes
of and . Since results have shown that the method can tol-
erate large impedance and source current variations, it is reason-
able to consider that the impact of variation is insignificant.
IV. VERIFICATION USING FIELD MEASUREMENTS
The proposed method is further assessed with field measure-
ment data. The system, shown in Fig. 8, exhibits 5th harmonic
distortions at the metering point. Extensive investigations were
conducted to determine which side is the main contributor to
the harmonic distortion. Due to a lack of other viable harmonic
source detection techniques at the time of the project, the
expensive impedance-based method was used. The utility and
customer impedances were determined from a series of field
measurements when disturbances such as line and capacitor
switching were introduced to either side. At the utility side,
eight operations were performed within several hours to find
the customer-side harmonic impedance. The calculated average
5th harmonic impedance is around . Another
two capacitor switching operations were performed at the
customer side to find the utility side impedance , the result
is . The system was also modeled for frequency
scan studies. The scanned and are found to be very
close to the measured ones. Eventually, the utility system was
identified as the main harmonic contributor with an average 5th
harmonic of 2160 V. The customer side source is about
858 V. The proposed method is applied to the ten snapshots
with the assumption of . The
calculated CI and other key parameters are listed in Table II.
The following conclusions can be drawn from the table.
1) The CI is always negative, so the utility generates reactive
power (after rotation of degrees) in all snapshots. The
harmonic source location needs to be detected by com-
paring CI with impedance . of superposition, this is equivalent to finding which source or
2) The main harmonic source is located at the utility side
since is always larger than which is about 563 .
This impedance value is derived from the measured data.
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 19, NO. 2, APRIL 2004
Fig. 8. One-line diagram of the field test system.
3) The smallest IET has a value of 58%. It means that one
can still detect the source correctly even if our knowledge
about differs from the actual (i.e., measured) value by
58%.
4) The first three snapshots have smaller IET than others.
This is because both the utility and customer sides gen-
erate reactive power in these cases. For the other seven
cases, the utility side generates reactive power and the
customer side absorbs; consequently, the tolerance on
impedance error can go as high as 258%.
5) The active power produced by the utility source is equal
to that received by the customer source. This is because,
after the rotation transform, the power is assumed to
transmit through a pure reactance of . There is no
active power consumption is the rotated case.
6) Further studies show that even if has an error from
to , the location of the main harmonic source can
still be correctly detected.
This practical case further proves the robustness of the proposed
method. It is shown that the method requires only approximate
harmonic impedance data and can tolerate large impedance er-
rors. Another advantage of the method is that once we find one
side absorbs reactive power (for example, the customer side of
snapshots 4 to 10), one can conclude that the main harmonic
source is located at the other side immediately without exam-
ining the magnitude of .
V. DISCUSSIONS
Our focus so far has been on determining which side has a
larger contribution to the PCC current distortion. It is equally
important to find out which source has more contribution to the
PCC voltage distortion. In fact, limiting the voltage distortions
has become more important in recent developments of harmonic
standards. In this section, the subject of applying the proposed
method to detect dominant source from the perspective of
voltage distortion is discussed.
The circuit for voltage distortion analysis is shown in Fig. 9.
The problem here is to find the larger contributor to the voltage
harmonic measured at PCC, . According to the principle
has a larger magnitude. If we still assume that the utility side
admittance is known, the utility side harmonic current
can be calculated from the PCC measurements. Consequently,
LI et al.: A “CRITICAL IMPEDANCE”-BASED METHOD FOR IDENTIFYING HARMONIC SOURCES 677

TABLE II
CALCULATION RESULTS OF THE TEN SNAPSHOTS

Note: the power direction is assumed to be sending for the utility

where . So the rotation transform developed

in Section II can be used directly. The transforming matrix
is still (15). In conclusion, the reactive power consumption
concept developed in this paper can be used to detect major
harmonic source from the perspective of either PCC voltage
distortion or PCC current distortion.

Fig. 9. Equivalent circuit for voltage harmonic analysis.
the reactive power absorbed by the utility current source can be
determined as
where . Referring to (2), we can see that if
the utility current source receives reactive power, one can con-
clude that the customer side has more contribution to . If
or the utility current source generates reactive power, we
need to check how much admittance will completely absorb that
reactive power. Similarly, imagine the admittance is uniformly
distributed between and , follow the procedure (4)–(7) and
consider:
the point where is the smallest can be determined as
where can be defined as the CA. The reactive power generated
by the utility current source will be absorbed by . It can be seen
that (21) has a similar structure as (7). By comparing with
, we can determine the dominant harmonic contributor to
the . distortion. In other words, the conclusions developed
in the previous sections can be applied to detect the main voltage
harmonic contributor by replacing with and with . When
the conductance cannot be ignored, that is , it is
easy to find
VI. CONCLUSION
The widely known active power direction method for har-
monic source detection is unfounded. A new reactive power-
based method is proposed in this paper. The method assumes
that the utility side impedance and the range of the customer
impedance are approximately known. A fictitious impedance
(19) (or admittance) named CI (or CA) is calculated from voltage
and current measured at the PCC. The result is compared with
the range of the combined utility and customer impedance (or
,
admittance) to determine which side is the dominant contributor
to the harmonic distortion measured at the PCC. The main con-
tributions of this work can be summarized as follows.
• Mathematical analysis has been presented to demonstrate
the pros and cons of the power direction-based methods.
The reactive power direction-based method is found to be
technically sound and is reliable when one source absorbs
reactive power.
(20) • The reactive power-based method is expanded with the
concept of critical impedance (or admittance), which
forms the core idea of the proposed method. Rigorous
theoretical analysis has proven that the concept presents
(21) a powerful alternative solution for the harmonic source
detection problem.
• A rotation transform is introduced to deal with general
cases. This transform has greatly simplified the analysis
and understanding of the harmonic source detection
problem. The combination of these three contributions
has resulted in a useful, practical, and reasonably reliable
method for locating dominant harmonic sources in a
power system.
• The paper has done extensive investigations on the error
characteristics of the proposed method. The method is fur-
ther checked using field measurements. All results have
shown that the method is robust and practical. It has the
potential to become a viable and easy-to-use tool for the
(22)
harmonic source detection problem.
678 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER DELIVERY, VOL. 19, NO. 2, APRIL 2004

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