The Study of Harmonic Reduction in Light Emitting
Diode (LED) Roadway Lighting System
Suntiti Yoomak, and Atthapol Ngaopitakkul
Department of Electrical Engineering, Faculty of Engineering
King Mongkut’s Institute of Technology Ladkrabang
Bangkok, Thailand
suntitiatim@hotmail.com, knatthap@kmitl.ac.th
Abstract—Since electrical energy is essential in human life, it
is necessary to find out a way to reduce its consumption. In the
past, in Thailand, they had to provide much energy to roadway
lighting system because main lighting equipment has consumed
high energy to generate lighting in the roadway. But today, we
are increasingly aware of energy consumption. As a result, Light
Emitting Diode (LED) luminaires are considered to be used in
roadway lighting system, to replace conventional inefficient
lighting lamps; this is due to their greater energy efficiency, high
color rendering index (CRI) (70-90), and long life. However, LED
luminaires have some disadvantages concerning harmonic
generation issued from LED’s driver. Hence, in this paper, LED
luminaire will be studied in terms of power quality improvement
by using AC-side Inductor Harmonic Filter. An experimental
setup will be designed to measure the electrical parameters. The
experimental results show that, without the filter, LED luminaire
contains much harmonic current distortion (THDi), but when
inserting the filter, the harmonic current distortion is decreased.
However, to ensure the overall functioning of the system, the final
results of harmonic current distortion should be complied with
the limit value of IEC 61000-3-2 standard.
Keywords—LED luminaire; Harmonic distortion; Harmonic
Filter; Power quality
I. INTRODUCTION
The good roadway lighting performance can help motorists
and road users more safety including the extraction of visual
information obtaining at night time. Actually, roadway lighting
should provide performance and visual comfort and help to
keep the driver alert. Many different studies have shown that
good roadway lighting can help reducing the number of night-
time accidents with more than 30% [1-3].
Usually, lighting system consumes 15-20% of the world
yearly electricity and 3% of the total electricity consumption is
for roadway lighting or street lighting [4]. In Thailand, the
electrical energy of approximately 2,379 GWh is annually
consumed for roadway lighting system [5]; they employ mostly
high pressure sodium (HPS) lamp which is well known for the
high luminous efficacy (100-110 lumen per Watt). In recent
year, the development of street lighting system to reduce
energy consumption and increase light efficacy is gaining
much interest all over the world. The light emitting diode
(LED) lamp is becoming viable replacement for roadway
lighting applications because they have many outstanding
978-1-5090-0908-4/16/$31.00 ©2016 IEEE
characteristics, such as providing high luminous efficacy (over
150 lumens per Watt) more than HPS lamp, long lifetime
(approximately 50,000-100,000 hour), high color rendering
index (approximately 70-90), high reliability, and energy
saving [6-9].
In part of LED luminaire driver, the paper [12] presented a
very low-cost circuit to drive a multistring LED luminaire for
roadway lighting. The driver circuit was designed based on a
DCM buck-boost power factor corrector stage and four simple
linear current equalizers. 176W LED luminaire is brought to
investigate procedure concept. In next paper [13], there is
proposed a two-stage solution, the first stage is PFC boost
converter and the second stage is the asymmetrical half bridge
(AHB). The design has been optimized based on the needs and
characteristics of LED luminaire roadway lighting applications.
The transformer was designed to minimize the conduction
losses while the converter is designed to reduce switching
losses in the MOSFETs and diodes during the dead times of
their duration. Experimental results showed efficiency as high
as 94.5% for this second stage by using a 40-W prototype.
Then, the SEPIC PFC converter topology operating in
continuous condition mode (CCM) was presented to encourage
a high efficiency LED luminaire driver for roadway lighting
application [14]. The simulated result showed that this
converter model has accomplished high efficiency and high
power factor all over the operating range with low total
harmonic distortion emission. Finally, this paper proposed
laboratory prototype to confirm the feasibility of LED
luminaire driver. In [15], paper proposed a high performance
LED lamp driver designing and stability boundaries predicting
what can facilitate the selection of practical parameters values
for maintaining stable operation. The process investigated
improper choice of system parameters from the converter that
can suffer fast-scale instability for some intervals of time
during the line cycle. The result was presented by simulation
method which was exact cycle-by-cycle system equations.
The above papers show that LED luminaire can surely
replace conventional lighting for roadway lighting system due
to energy saving, environmental impact, light distribution,
mesopic vision but not for power quality. It has to be noted that
LED luminaire driver is a vital part that controls efficiently
LED luminaire operating and also generates harmonics in the
system by consulting these papers [16-18]. In this study, 30W
LED luminaire is selected to investigate power quality by
measurement tests. In addition, the harmonic filter design is
proposed by using AC-side inductor in order to limit harmonics
distortion from LED luminaire driver. The experimental results
will be finally compared with IEC 61000-3-2 harmonic
standard to confirm the high performance and power quality.
II. THE HARMONICS MEASUREMENT OF LED LUMINAIRE
To analyze the power quality of LED luminaire, 30-Watt
LED is evaluated by operating at 220 VAC at 50 Hz. Fluke 43b
power quality meter is used to measure electrical
characteristics of power quality in terms of harmonics, voltage,
power and current waveforms as seen in TABLE I and Fig. 1.
TABLE I. Primary data of LED luminaires from measurement
Type of Power Vrms Irms
%THDV %THDi
luminaire (W) (V) (A)
LED 30 2.1 223.9 146.1 0.313
(a) Voltage waveform
(b) Current waveform
Fig. 1. Measured waveforms of LED luminaire
From measurement results, the detail of power quality
when LED luminaire evaluation is tested is shown in TABLE
I. The LED luminaire normally functions with power 30W,
voltage 223V, current 0.313A and low voltage total harmonic
distortion percentage (%THDv) 2.1%. On the other hand, LED
driver produces high current total harmonic distortion
percentage (%THDi) with the value of 146% in the system. as
depicted in Fig. 1(b). It shows harmonic distortion with effect
on current waveform that is different from the pure sinusoidal
waveform, but when considering voltage waveform, it is
confirmed to the low %THDv. Likewise, the main order
frequency effect to harmonic current distortion from driver is
low-order harmonic currents (3rd, 5th and 7th) as illustrated in
Fig. 2.
Experimental result shows that LED luminaire basically
generates current harmonic distortion in the system. This
effects on power quality; concept of harmonic filter design is
presented by using AC-side Inductor. Insulate enameled
copper wire is coiled to make harmonic filter. In experiment,
current harmonic decreasing and voltage fluctuation limit at
the output of the rectifier are accomplished based on laminated
– iron core inductor 0.310 H.
Fig. 2. Current harmonics issued from the LED driver.
(a) Before integrated AC-side inductor
(b) After integrated AC-side inductor
Fig. 3. The experimental set of AC-side inductor harmonic filter
Fig. 3 presents a schematic diagram of the experimental
setup using to investigate power quality. Sinusoidal one-phase
AC source was generated in the experimental setup and the 30-
Watt LED luminaire was evaluated power quality. In Fig. 3(a)
shows the schematic diagram of measuring LED luminaire
before integrated AC-side inductor and Fig. 3(b) shows the
schematic diagram of measuring LED luminaire after
integrated AC-side inductor.
III. EXPERIMENTAL SETUP
From Fig. 4, harmonic filter by using AC-side inductor is
applied with 30W LED luminaire. The results of comparative
experiment when pre and post integration of AC-side inductor
harmonic filter are presented in TABLE II. Generally, power
quality values are the same when AC-side inductor harmonic
filter is added, but current and total harmonic distortion
(%THDi) decrease to provide a better power quality. It can be
seen that AC-side inductor harmonic filter can reduce current
harmonic distortion.
IV. CONCLUSION
The use of LED luminaire in street lighting system has
promoted to efficient energy consumption, but LED luminaire
functioning needs switched mode electronic drive, which
causes high disturbances in harmonics. In this paper, the power
quality measurement of LED luminaire was studied from
experimental setup. The LED luminaire had overall normal
power quality values except total harmonic distortion (%THDi)
that showed high value due to driver operation. In experimental
setup, the harmonic filter with AC-side inductor was designed
to improve power quality. The experimental results showed
that LED luminaire had current harmonic distortion (%THDi)
in power system. The experimental setup by using AC-side
Inductor Harmonic Filter can decrease current harmonic
distortion but it is noticeable that the test cannot accomplish the
limit value according to the IEC standard at low frequency
order.

(a) Voltage waveform

Fig. 4. The experimental harmonic filter based on AC-side inductor, in

roadway lighting system
(b) Current waveform

Fig. 5 shows waveform results of current and voltage when

adding harmonic filter based on AC-side inductor; the voltage Fig. 5. Measured waveforms of LED lamp by integrating AC-side inductor
harmonic filter
waveform is the same as before using harmonic filter but the
current waveform changes. By comparative considering
between Fig. 1(b) and Fig. 5(b), it is noticeable that the
harmonic distortion in low-order harmonic currents (3rd, 5th
and 7th) trend to decrease by observing Fig. 6. The current
harmonic distortion comparison in Table III shows clearly
much lower total harmonic distortion in each harmonic order.
In order to evaluate harmonic distortion standard, the
experiment is carried out with LED luminaire in normal case
and LED luminaire with integrated by AC-side inductor
harmonic filter. As seen in Fig. 7, the harmonic filter by
integrated with AC-side inductor can reduce current harmonic
distortion. But, this result is not highly satisfied, especially for
Fig. 6. Current harmonics by integrating AC-side inductor harmonic filter.
low-order harmonic currents when comparing with IEC 61000-
3-2 standard.
 Before using Inductor
Harmonic Filter

After using Inductor

Harmonic Filter

IEC Standard 61000-3-2

Fig. 7. Comparison between before and after adding the AC-side inductor harmonic filter

TABLE II. The power quality values of LED lamp for pre and post integration of AC-side inductor harmonic filter measured in experiment setup

LED lamp 30 W
Measurement Data
Before adding harmonic filter After adding harmonic filter Difference percentage (%)
Real Power (W) 30 29 -3.33
Apparent Power (VA) 55 44 -20.00
Reactive Power (Var) 47 32 -31.91
Frequency (Hz) 50 50 0
Power factor 0.54 0.67 24.07
% THDv 2.1 2 -4.76
Voltage (V) 223.9 223.5 -0.18
% THDi 146.1 58 -60.30
Current (A) 0.313 0.162 -48.24

TABLE III. The measurement results of LED lamp driver for pre and post integration of AC-side inductor harmonic filter
Harmonic order 1 3 5 7 9 11 13 15 17 19 21
%f (without filter) 100 91 77.2 59.2 40.9 23.2 19.9 13.1 17 17.5 14.7
%f (with filter) 100 52.2 16.3 12.3 9.7 7.4 4.6 0.9 0.2 0.2 0.2

[7] Y. K. Cheng and K. W. E. Cheng, "General Study for using LED to

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