The Performance of the BTB-VSC for Active Power Balancing, Reactive Power Compensation and Current Harmonic Filtering in the Interconnected Systems

Abstract

Nowadays, the use of power converters to control active and reactive power in AC–AC grid-connected systems has increased. With respect to indirect AC–AC converters, the tendency is to enable the back-to-back (BTB) voltage source converter (VSC) as an active power filter (APF) to compensate current harmonics. Most of the reported works use the BTB-VSC as an auxiliary topology that, combined with other topologies, is capable of active power regulation, reactive power compensation and current harmonic filtering. With the analysis presented in this work, the framework of the dynamics associated with the control loops is established and it is demonstrated that BTB-VSC can perform the three tasks for which, in the reviewed literature, at least two different topologies are reported. The proposed analysis works to support the performance criteria of the BTB-VSC when it executes the three control actions simultaneously and the total current harmonic distortion is reduced from 27.21% to 6.16% with the selected control strategy.

Selection of C-Type Filters for Reactive Power Compensation and Filtration of Higher Harmonics Injected into the Transmission System by Arc Furnaces

“…The growing use of electronic systems in power receivers decreases energy consumption in numerous production processes [1][2][3][4], but also creates new risks. The associated dangers include higher harmonic components that lead to the unnecessary activation of protective devices, such as residual-current protection devices [5][6][7], harmonic components that disrupt the operation of automatic synchronizers [8], as well as harmonic components that occur in non-stationary signals in various interdisciplinary applications, for example related to acoustics [9], electric vehicles [10], or even seemingly distant biomedical engineering [11,12].…”