Impact of Converter Topology on the Shunt Active Power Filter Systems Efficiency

Abstract

This paper presents the performance of shunt active power filters (Shunt APFs) which can compensate harmonic currents generated by no-linear load based on five and seven-level neural point clamped (NPC) inverters. Multilevel inverters are currently being investigated and used in several industrial applications. Their advantages include the capability to reduce the harmonic content and decrease the voltage or current ratings of the semiconductors. On the other side, fuzzy techniques are successfully employed in various industrial applications; they represent a good alternative to traditional control systems. To benefit of all these advantages an efficient control scheme for five and seven-level Shunt APF based on multi-carrier pulse width modulation (MC-PWM) and fuzzy control approaches are adopted in this work. The fuzzy controller is designed to improve compensation capability of shunt APF by adjusting the error using a fuzzy rule. The control strategy to identify the current reference uses synchronous detection method (SMD), this technique is easy to implement and achieves good performances. The numerical simulation results carried with MATLAB-Simulink and SimPowerSystems Toolbox show the effectiveness of the proposed systems and confirm the superiority of the seven-level shunt APF compared to five-level configuration system.