ANALYSIS AND SIMULATION OF A NEW SHUNT ACTIVE POWER FILTER USING CASCADED MULTILEVEL INVERTER

Eswaran Chandra Sekaran - Ponna Nadar Anbalagan - Chelliah Palanisamy

   To provide high power quality at the Point of Common Coupling (PCC) of power distribution systems, elimination of the harmonic is indispensably necessary. Most of the important international standards (like IEEE-519-1992, IEC-6100) have defined the power quality and given some harmonic limits. Different methods are proposed in literature for solving the harmonic problems. One of these methods, the Active Power Filters (APFs)technique has been studied and developed in the recent years to solve the harmonic problems. The main objective of this paper is to model a new shunt active power filter using a three-phase 11-level cascaded multi level inverter for both harmonic filtering and reactive power (var) compensation under the steady-state condition which is mainly suitable for high and medium power applications. In this paper, the shunt active power filters are designed using a three-phase, 11-level cascade-inverter and a three-phase conventional pulse width modulation (PWM) based inverter in MATLAB (using power system simulink tools), finally they are compared and their simulation results verified for a distorted three-phase, 500 kVA, 440 V, 50 Hz power system utility.

Keywords: PWM based NPC-inverter, cascaded multilevel inverter, shunt active power filter, THD, FFT

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