DC Electric Arc Furnace Modelling for Power Quality Indices Assessment

The operation of an Electric Arc Furnace (EAF) determines power quality disturbances in terms of voltage fluctuations and waveform distortions, due to the particular nature of the heating process and of the electric arc phenomenon. The analysis of DC EAFs and their induced power quality disturbances may be conveniently posed within a chaotic modeling framework. This paper presents a procedure for tuning the parameters of a chaotic model for the DC electrical arc. The procedure is based on a Simulink representation of the DC EAF installation and on the Chua's model to represent the arc chaotic behaviour. The parameters of the Chua's model are iteratively tested and optimized to minimize the errors in the evaluation of the spectral content of current waveforms at the point of common coupling. Data measured at the point of common coupling of an actual DC EAF are considered to carry out numerical simulations aimed at verifying the effectiveness of the proposed tuning procedure.