Meeting IEEE-519 current harmonics and power factor constraints with a three-phase three wire active power filter under distorted source voltages

An efficient steady-state compensation method and a conceptual design for sizing the three-phase three-wire shunt active power filter (APF) under nonsinusoidal source voltages are presented in this paper. Conventionally, the compensation currents injected by the APF are determined to eliminate harmonic currents of the nonlinear load as well as to compensate reactive power and maintain the sinusoidal source currents. However, the subject related to the optimal control of the APF to meet the IEEE-519 harmonic current limits and other constraints, such as minimum load power factor requirement after compensation with an optimal kilovolt-ampere rating, are rarely investigated. In this paper, an optimization-based solution algorithm is proposed to determine the three-phase three-wire APF current injections to meet different constraints with an optimal filter size, where the voltage compensation-based control strategy is formulated as a nonlinear programming problem and is solved to find the optimal compensator gains and APF current injections. Results obtained by simulations with Matlab/Simulink show that the proposed approach is very flexible and effective for compensating harmonic currents generated by the nonlinear load with an optimal size of the APF.