Active Harmonic Filtering Using Multilevel H-bridge Inverter Based STATCOM

Abstract

This paper proposed three-phase multilevel cascaded H-bridge inverter (MCHI) based active harmonic filtering (AHF) compensator, or refer to as static synchronous compensator (STATCOM), to minimize the harmonic components in a transmission network. There are three main elements to form a STATCOM, namely: control scheme, modulation technique and inverter topology. In this work, the synchronous reference frame (SRF) based controller is designed and implemented to produce the desired modulating signals (i.e., one for each phase) for the pulse width modulation (PWM) module. For simplicity, the carrier based pulse width modulation (CBPWM) with in phase disposition (IPD) technique is employed to generate the pulse trains and drive the three-phase five-level CHI. On the other hand, two three-phase non-linear loading conditions, which structured by different transformer winding configurations and power rectifier circuits, are utilized to verify the feasibility of the proposed AHF. The effectiveness and the theoretical prediction of the proposed approach is investigated and validated through simulation studies using MATLAB SIMULINK software package.