An effective shunt active power filter based on novel binary multilevel inverter and optimal type-2 fuzzy system to accurately mitigate harmonic currents

Many power quality problems related to the harmonic currents have been recently reported, which are mainly caused by a large penetration of nonlinear loads such as power electronic converters, adjustable speed drivers, electric arc furnaces, and so forth. One of the fundamental solutions to simultaneously remove these harmonics is to use a shunt active power filter, which is known as multilevel inverter-based harmonic compensator. An important drawback of multilevel inverters is including a large number of semiconductor switches along with relevant gate drivers, which can highly increase their cost price and complexity. An asymmetric BMLI with low switch count is structured for VSI of SAPF to provide high-step staircase sinusoidal voltage for mitigating all harmonic currents caused by the non-linear loads. A hybrid energy storage system based on PV and BESS has been structured as power source of SAPF to continuously compensate the harmonic currents. An optimal type-2 fuzzy system based on bezier search differential evolution algorithm has been structured for control system of SAPF to provide an accurate active current signal for keeping the dc-link voltage constant and compensating the power losses. The level-creation capability of proposed multilevel inverter has been compared with other prominent and inventive multilevel inverters in terms of number of semiconductor switches. To more corroborate its simulation structure, prototype model of the proposed multilevel inverter has been set up and tested in laboratory. The harmonic current compensation capability of the shunt active power filter with the proposed binary multilevel inverter and the conventional binary multilevel inverter has been evaluated under different loading conditions. The proposed binary multilevel inverter can create 31 levels with 14 semiconductor switches considering that other multilevel inverters can create less than 27 levels with same semiconductor switches. Also, the shunt active power filter based on the proposed/conventional binary multilevel inverter has respectively compensated the harmonic currents caused by nonlinear rectifier load and arc furnace load with THD of 0.75%/3.08% and 2.88%/4.52%.