Power quality improvement in 3-phase 3-wire distribution systems using modular active power filter

Active power filters have been introduced for the purpose of power quality improvement. The power converter used as an active filter is rated based on the magnitude of the injected current and is operated at the switching frequency required to perform the filtering job successfully. Excessive losses are expected if the converter's power rating and switching frequency are both high. In this paper, an efficient and reliable active filter system for the power quality enhancement is proposed. The proposed filter is based on 3-phase PWM-controlled current–source converter (CSC) modules, where each filter module is dedicated to eliminate a specific harmonic and/or balance the line currents. Based on the information extracted from the line by the ADALINE, each leg of every CSC module is independently controlled to perform the balancing or/and harmonic filtering in a 3-phase 3-wire distribution system. As the harmonic order increases, the magnitudes of the harmonics decrease and their frequencies increase. Therefore, the power rating of the active filter modules will decrease and their switching frequency (bandwidth) will increase with the harmonic order. As a result, the overall switching losses are minimized due to balanced ‘power rating-switching frequency’ product. An economic study shows that the modular approach is superior to the conventional one converter scheme. Furthermore, the modular approach offers higher reliability, as the failure of one converter does not jeopardize the whole filtering mission. Speed and accuracy of ADALINE, self-synchronizing harmonic tracking, optimized dc-side current values and minimal converter losses are additional features of the proposed filter. The theoretical expectations are verified by digital simulation using EMTDC simulation package.