Abstract—The power quality plays a major role in the life of our equipment. For the proper functioning of our equipment the supplied power should be of good quality. Power quality declines due to many factors. Some of which includes lightning, switching transients, brown outs, sharing of neutrals in large infrastructural areas. It also causes harmonic distortions. Poor power quality leads to large economical loses. the loses are in the range of several billion dollars. Poor Power quality affects the power supply system and cause damage to the power supply systems and cause more economical loss to the consumers. Low power quality mainly affects the domestically appliances like personal computer, inductive motors and commercial appliances like aircraft controlling systems, rectifiers, etc. Power quality monitoring is the mechanism widely used to monitor the power over power supply systems and made the record of fluctuations in the waveform, voltage supply, harmonic distortion, etc. Harmonic distortions widely play role in power quality and increase frequencies of harmonics will generate great destruction to the power supply systems. To overcome all such difficulties rectification of power supply is made. Good rectification is made through of proper grounding of power equipment and well designed loads in the power supply systems. In order to have good quality of power we have to maintain power factor near unity. In order to maintain the power factor in places where large inductive loads are used, a capacitor is connected in parallel to the inductive load. Uninterrupted power supplies are also used to safeguard the sensitive equipment from the interruptions. It has island switching mechanism which will cause the sensitive loads to run on batteries.

Index Terms—Power quality, Harmonics, Loads, Brownouts, Power factor, Economical losses, Blackouts, Rectification, Grounding, Transients, Power quality standards

Cite: Vignesh R, Vivek S, Saravanan S and Sabarish S, "POWER QUALITY," International Journal of Electrical and Electronic Engineering & Telecommunications, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 154-165, March 2015.