Relationship of complex load angle, voltage/current phase different and load factor
A rectifier circuit represents a nonlinear load on the AC power system. As a result. the AC input current is not perfectly sinusoidal. It contains harmonic components. In such a situation, there are the two ways of defining power factor give two different results. The angular displacement between the voltage and current gives one result, often called the displacement power factor or displacement factor. I believe &quot;displacement coefficient&quot; may be another name (or translation) for displacement factor.
If S is calculated using the total RMS values of the current and voltage, including the harmonic content, a different value of power factor is obtained. That power factor is often called the &quot;true&quot; power factor. I prefer to call it the &quot;total&quot; power factor because there are important differences between that power factor and the power factor for a system that does not have harmonic distortion. If a load without distortion is and a load with distortion are both connected to the same source, the total value of S is not simply the sum of the values of S for the two loads as would be the case for two undistorted loads. When a load has distortion, it is necessary to calculate the total fundamental current and the total harmonic separately and then calculate the total as the square root of the sum of the squares.
The term &quot;load angle&quot; may mean the cos(R/Z) for the load. However that is not a very meaningful concept for Z in a DC circuit. Displacement and total power factors can only be calculated by determining the harmonic of the AC current. I don't believe that can be done directly from cos(R/Z). I don't know exactly how to do that at the moment.