I have to wonder about VD and asymmetric loads. Darn near everything is such now, thanks to power semiconductors.
Washer? VFD
Range? phase chopper
HVAC compressor?
So what does the drop look like over the full sine wave, with so many loads on the trailing half of the cycle?
We don’t really call it asymmetric loads, the preferable term is unbalanced loads. You are correct however about more and more equipment being an unbalanced load. Taking this concept further, everything is actually/technically an unbalanced load (semiconductor or not). Nothing is 100% fully balanced… However, we use unbalanced loads in circuit analysis because it greatly simplifies the calculations (reducing everything to a per-phase basis) and in many cases can be considered sufficiently close. As far as power semiconductors, they may or may not be considered balanced- I think what you mean is non-linear? (Which isn’t the same thing as being unbalanced).
That being said, calculating voltage drop for 2w circuits is easy (you most likely already know how to do this), but 3ph, 4w circuits would be a bit more complicated in solving for unbalanced currents and voltages. You’d need to check the maximum L-L and L-N voltage drop as they may not longer be related by root-3 at the load.
Side note: Balanced loads but with unbalanced supply voltage would give a similar result as unbalanced loads.
Lastly, saying something like, “So what does the drop look like over the full sine wave, with so many loads on the trailing half of the cycle?” doesn’t really make sense.
Perhaps try, “So what does the voltage drop look like for a [_PH, _W] circuit, with so many loads on connected in a [L-L-L/L-L/L-N] configuration”?
