Assessment of Electric Power Quality in Ship Systems Fitted with Converter Subsystems (Advances of Electrical Drives and Power Electronics)

Dynamic development of electric engineering during the last dozen-or-so years, manifested by introduction of many novel technical solutions dealing with processes of electric energy production and usage, made it necessary to form a new outlook of electric power quality in electric power systems. To a large degree it concerns ship electric engineering because of specific features of marine environment and operational conditions of technical systems used in it.

An appropriate quality of electric energy produced, transferred and used in a ship electric power system, usually understood as fulfillment of given requirements by the vector components of three-phase voltage on the main switchboard busbars, is the fundamental condition for correct operation of shipboard technical systems. Additional conditions result from the specific features of the ship environment and deal with proportional distribution of active and reactive powers among working-in-parallel electric generating sets, as well as with the permissible level of radioelectric disturbances in the considered systems.

Almost any failure of such systems as propulsion or navigational one results in risk of an accident at sea. Hence development of investigation methods and relevant measurement instrumentation for quality assessment of electric power on ships seems to be an important and topical issue of a still cognitive character. It should be clearly stressed that the problem of assessment of electric power quality is important for every ship electric power system irrespective of its configuration. However its importance is greater for the systems having converter subsystems due to high intensity of disturbances occurring in them, of different levels and hardly predictable consequences of their influence.