Experimental analysis of harmonic and power factor for various lighting loads

Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFL) and Light Emitting Diode (LED) Lamps are increasingly becoming popular as energy saving lamps among the consumers due to their long lifetime, good luminous output and encouragement from the governments of many countries. LEDs and CFLs are reported to be less real power consuming, energy efficient and economic than their counterpart incandescent lamps. However, as nonlinear loads, LEDs and CFLs draw extremely distorted currents with poor power factor. Hence, a massive usage of LEDs and CFLs forlighting is likely to generate important power qualitycrisis as well as loss for the power companies. This paper reports the experimental results of harmonicanalysis up to 50
^th
order, power factor and luminous efficiency in terms of lumen per watt for some widely used CFL, LED, fluorescent and incandescent lamps for indoor lighting. Experimental results show that LED could be more economical, higher luminous efficiency with lower harmonic absorbing lighting source than CFL, fluorescent and incandescent lamps.