Month-Wise Investigation on Residential Load Consumption Impact during COVID-19 Period on Distribution Transformer and Practical Mitigation Solution

S. M. Mahfuz Alam (), Ahmed Abuhussein and Mohammad Ashraf Hossain Sadi
Additional contact information
S. M. Mahfuz Alam: Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Dhaka University of Engineering & Technology, Gazipur 1707, Bangladesh
Ahmed Abuhussein: Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Gannon University, Erie, PA 16056, USA
Mohammad Ashraf Hossain Sadi: School of Technology, University of Central Missouri, Warrensburg, MO 64093, USA

Energies, 2023, vol. 16, issue 5, 1-24

Abstract: This paper investigates the month-wise impact of COVID-19 conditions on residential load due to people’s presence at home during office hours in Memphis city, Tennessee, USA. The energy consumption patterns of four consumers are analyzed based on the data available from pre-COVID to continuing COVID-19 situations. It is observed that the energy consumptions from April 2020 to June 2021 for all families have increased during office hours than that of pre-COVID months. Therefore, the impacts of the increased loads on distribution transformer are analyzed in terms of hottest spot, top-oil temperature, and loss of transformer life. Moreover, an experimental setup is made to produce the harmonics in currents of non-linear residential load which has detrimental effects on temperature rise of distribution transformer. In addition, this work proposes implementation of harmonic filter at the load side considering the impact of harmonics produced by loads to reduce the temperature rise due to the increased load consumption and presence of harmonics in currents produced by the load. The rise in temperatures and the loss of life of distribution transformer with and without the proposed solutions are simulated in MATLAB to show the efficacy of the proposed solution. Moreover, cost value analysis among different methods, which can be implemented to reduce the adverse impact on distribution transformer, are provided to rank the available methods.

Keywords: COVID-19; distribution transformer; temperature rise; residential loads; harmonic filter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/5/2294/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/16/5/2294/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:16:y:2023:i:5:p:2294-:d:1082271

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Agatha Cao

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().