Improved Dynamic Performance of Shunt Active Power Filter Using Particle Swarm Optimization

In this paper, a novel particle swarm optimization (PSO) technique is proposed to tune the proportional-integral (PI) controller gain parameters for enhancing the dynamic performance of the shunt active power filter (APF). The shunt APFs are well established filter to compensate current harmonics, reactive power to maintain the power factor unity. The compensation is highly influenced by the DC-link voltage regulation. The calculated PI controller gain parameters conventionally, are giving satisfactory results under steady state condition of the load. However, tuning of the PI controller parameters under fast changing loads are very difficult. To improve the dynamic performance of the system and optimize the gain parameters of the PI controller, a PSO technique is proposed. The modified p-q theory uses a composite observer filter to extract fundamental component of voltage from the distorted supply voltage for the further process of calculating reference current. A complete comparison of conventional and PSO based PI controller gain tuning have been simulated using MATLAB (R) Simulink software under different supply voltage and load condition of the system. The results show that the dynamic response is improved with PSO based PI tuning compared to conventional PI tuning.