IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 15, NO.

4, JULY 2000

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A Novel Active Power Filter Based on the Least Compensation Current Control Method
Luowei Zhou and Zicheng Li

AbstractA new least compensation current technique to detect the harmonic and reactive current for active power filters is presented in this paper. With the technique, a novel active power filter based on the least compensated current control is proposed, in which the measurement of harmonic and reactive current and the generation of compensated current are completed in the same closed-loop. Compared with the existing control methods of active power filter, the proposed method has simpler structure, quicker dynamic, higher reliability and better compensation performance. Simulating and experimental results are provided that verified theoretical predictions and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method and circuit configuration. Index TermsActive power filter, detection and control method, harmonic distortion.

variation [5]. In addition, these methods are only suitable for three phase circuits. For single-phase active power filters, many methods to obtain the current reference required by the active power filter have been proposed [5][7], [9][11]. The simplest one is to use electronic filters of band-pass type [7]. But it is only applicable in the situation where the load currents are periodic and unchanged in phase and magnitude. Furthermore, the output of electronic filter is very sensitive to the frequency and the variation of component parameters. Therefore, it is unpractical in most applications. In other methods, the current is achieved by subtracting the active current reference from the measured load current component

I. INTRODUCTION OWER electronics appliances are used widely in industrial, commercial and consumer environment. As a byproduct, these appliances generate harmonic and reactive current in the utility system that cause EMI pollution to other loads in the system. Conventionally, passive LC filters have been used to eliminate line current harmonic and to improve the power factor. However, these passive LC filters based on resonant principle have many disadvantages, such as their inability to compensate random harmonic current variation, large size, tuning problems, and parallel resonance. To solve these problems, active power filters have been reported [1][14] and considered as a possible solution for reducing current harmonics and improving the power factor due to their small size, no requirement for tuning, stable operation. The performance of active power filters is based on the methods used to obtain the current reference and the control laws to generate the compensation current. In recent years, methods based on the instantaneous power theory [12][14] have been used in three-phase active power filters to obtain the current reference without any time delay, which is very important to obtain a good compensation for an active power filter. However, methods based on the instantaneous power theory require complex circuitry to implement the transformation, e.g. four to six high-precision analog multipliers are used in each phase. This makes the circuit sensitive to component parameter

(1) In (1), can be measured, while the sinusoidal function comes from the ac line voltage. To obtain the magnitude of the active current component, several different approaches have been reported. One of them is to let the product of the passes a low-pass load current and a sinusoidal function filter [5], [6], thus in the output of the filter, an estimation of the magnitude of the active current component can be obtained. The others are based on either balance of the average voltage of the dc capacitor [4], [9], or calculating the real power consumed by the load [10]. Of all the proposed methods for single-phase active power filter, the time delay to obtain the current reference and the precision are problematic. In the previous work, the time delay is at least one line cycle that leads to poor compensation for the random variation of the nonlinear load current. In this paper, a new least compensated current technique to detect the harmonic and reactive current for active power filter is presented, and a novel active power filter with least compensation current control is realized by using negative feedback control. The concept of the least compensation current is presented and explained in Section II. The scheme of the proposed active power filter with the least compensation current control is given and discussed in Section III. By means of the control technique of least compensation current and close-loop detection of the current reference, the proposed active power filter is simple in construction and excellent in transient performance. Furthermore, it is not sensitive to frequency and component parameter variations, so that no high-precision components are required. In Section IV, the simulation and experiment results are provided that verify the validity of theoretical analysis and demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed control method and circuit configuration.

Manuscript received December 7, 1998; revised January 14, 2000. This work was supported by the National Nature Science Council, China, under Contract 59 477 021. Recommended by Associate Editor, J. Thottuvelil. The authors are with the College of Electric Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing 400044, China (e-mail: zluowei@dns1.cqu.edu.cn). Publisher Item Identifier S 0885-8993(00)05570-8.

08858993/00$10.00 2000 IEEE

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II. THE LEAST COMPENSATION CURRENT METHOD DETECTING CURRENT REFERENCE Assuming the ac line voltage

FOR

(2) The nonlinear load current

(8) (3) is the fundamental current of is the harwhere and are active and reactive current compomonic, respectively, is current reference which is nents of the the sum of harmonic and reactive current. It can be described as (4) is sinusoidal and in phase with ac line voltage Since , it can be expressed as (5) is the magnitude of the active current . Therewhere can be obtained by calculating fore, the current reference . It is assumed to calculate Therefore, we have (9), shown at the bottom of the page. From can be ob(9), it can be seen that the minimum value of . This means that when the integratained by adjusting that is the magtion reaches its minimum value, is equal to nitude of fundamental active current at the moment. Therefore, the current reference can be obtained as follows: In this equation, , due to current of is magnitude of fundamental active

(6) is an adjustable parameter. If , then . In this case includes not only harmonic and reactive but also partial active current . If current is realized by adjusting the , then and are and are unknown. However, they achieved. In (5), both can be determined by considering the root mean square value of In (5),

(10) In practical application, in order to simplify calculation, the inis used to substitute for tegration of absolute value of of . Apparently, if the nonlinear the root mean square load current is periodic, one adjustment of is needed to reach . If the nonlinear load current is nonsteady state to obtain periodic, will be adjusted continually to follow the change of the fundamental active current magnitude. III. THE PROPOSED ACTIVE POWER FILTER Fig. 1 shows a schematic diagram of basic structure of the proposed active power filter with least compensation current is nonlinear load current and is its control. In Fig. 1, is the output current of active power filter and sample; is its sample; is desired current reference; is a given conis the sinusoidal reference current which is stant and

(7) can be expressed by its Fourier Series. The load current can be expressed as Therefore,

(9)

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Fig. 3. Simplified equivalent circuit of inverter.

Fig. 1.

Proposed active power filter.

Fig. 4. Fig. 2. Minimization operation circuit of the compensation current I .

Principle of the hysteresis control.

in phase with the voltage of power source. The proposed active power filter consists of two parts, one is the current reference circuit based on the least compensation current method and the other one is the compensation circuit. The two parts are in the same control loop. First, the operation principle of current reference circuit based on the least compensation current method will be discussed in detail. A. The Operation Principle of the Least Compensated Current Control To implement the minimization operation of , let us consider the increment of at the time interval between and

smaller, it means that the feedback polarity is correction. When is larger than zero, which means the modification makes becomes larger, it means the feedback polarity is wrong and should be changed by the feedback polarity circuitry. By this way, the feedback polarity distinguish circuit could guarantee will be driven to its minimum value. In order to speed that is up the adjusting of at the start up, an initial constant assigned to . Therefore, when the circuit reaches its steady is the magnitude of the fundamental active curstate, is obtained at the output of rent. Then the current reference current reference circuit. To obtain a good compensation performance, in Fig. 1 comes from the output current of active power filter, so that the distortion of power stage can be rejected in the feedback loop. B. Compensation Circuit In the current compensation circuit of Fig. 1, the inverter is a single-phase H-bridge voltage type inverter with IGBT switches. To generate the compensation current that follows the current reference, usually two types of control, the PWM control and hysteresis control, are used. In this paper, the hysteresis model control method is adopted. Fig. 3 is the simplified equivalent circuit of main power circuit, in which and are two switches, is ac line voltage, and are equivalent voltage sources. In order to drive compensation and current to follow the change of current reference should be controlled by following rules. reaches the 1) When the compensating current sample is turned on and is turned current reference , then increases linearly. off, assuming reaches the 2) When the compensation current sample is turned off and is turned current reference on, then decreases linearly. In this way, is driven to follow the current reference within a hysteresis , as shown in Fig. 4.

(11) From (11), we can see that it is unnecessary to actually comin the practical circuit, only a time pute the integration of delay circuit with exact time delay is needed to compute which is used to modify to drive reach its minimum value. Fig. 2 shows the practical circuit that implements the minimization operation of . The circuit consists of a time delay circuit with an exact time delay , a controller, a feedback polarity distinguish circuit, a sinusoidal waveform generator, and is fed to the conan analog multiplier. In this circuit, troller, the output of controller passes the feedback polarity distinguish circuit to adjust the parameter . The feedback po. When larity is distinguished according to the sign of is less than zero, which indicates the modification makes

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Fig. 5. Simulation waveforms with load current change ramps up from 10 A to 20 A in a line cycle.

Fig. 8. Experiment waveforms with load current of step changes. top: output current of active power filter, bottom: nonlinear load current.

Fig. 6. A.

Simulation waveforms with load current step changes from 10 A to 20 Fig. 9. Experiment waveforms with load current of step changes. top: ac line current, bottom: nonlinear load current.

Fig. 7. Simulation waveforms with load current decrease from 20 A to zero.

IV. SIMULATION AND EXPERIMENT To examine the performance of the proposed detection method and the active power filter, a prototype was built and tested under a single-phase power supply of 220 V. The major parameters of the main power stage are as follows: dc bus V; value of dc bus capacitor is 2200 F; value voltage of smoothing inductor is 10 mH. The detection and control based on the least compensated current were accomplished by controller parameter is a microprocessor. The . A full-wave rectifier with an RL load is employed as the nonlinear load. The simulation results are shown in Figs. 57. Fig. 5 shows the simulating result when the nonlinear load current changes ramps up from 10 A to 20 A in a line cycle. The ac line current follows the change of nonlinear load current very well without any time delay. Fig. 6 shows when the nonlinear current takes a step change from 10 A to 20 A,

Fig. 10. Experiment waveforms with load current of step changes. top: ac line current, bottom: nonlinear load current.

the ac line current waveform and output current waveform of active power filter. From Fig. 6, we can see that it takes only half line cycle for the active power filter to follow the step change of load current. Fig. 7 shows, when the nonlinear load decrease from 20 A to zero, the output current waveform of the active power filter and ac line current waveform. It takes also only half line cycles for the ac line current to follow the change. Figs. 810 are the experiment results. In Fig. 8, the top line shows the waveforms of compensation current of active power filter, the bottom line shows the nonlinear load current with a step change from 4 A to 1 A. In Fig. 9, the top line shows the ac line current after compensated by the proposed active power filter, the bottom line shows the nonlinear load current with a step change from 4 A to 1 A. In Fig. 10, the bottom line

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shows the nonlinear current, which changes first from 4 A to 1 A then from 1 A to 4 A. The top line is ac line current after compensation. They match the simulation results very well. V. CONCLUSION A novel and effective control method for a single-phase active filter was presented by developing a detection method for current reference based on least compensated current principle. Compared with the existing methods, the proposed detection and control method has following advantages. 1) Simpler circuit structure and no high-precision components required. 2) Not sensitive to both the frequency and component parameter variations. 3) High detection and control precision due to the use of the least compensated current principle which guarantees no active current in the compensated current so that the active power filter operates more efficiently. 4) Faster transient response is obtained because no electronic filter is used in the proposed circuit, which is very important for active power filter to be used in the practical applications where the load current varies randomly. The feasibility of the proposed scheme was verified by simulation and experimental results. ACKNOWLEDGMENT The authors would like to thank Dr. K. M. Smedley, Power Electronics Lab, University of California, Irvine, for many valuable and constructive suggestions for the revision of this paper. REFERENCES
[1] J. W. Dixon, Control system for three-phase active filter which simultaneously compensates power factor and unbalanced loads, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 42, pp. 635641, Dec. 1995. [2] M. Aredes and E. H. Watanabe, New control algorithms for series and shunt three-phase four-wire active power filter, IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 10, July 1995. [3] Y. Hayashi, A novel control of a current-source active filter for ac power system harmonic compensation, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 27, pp. 380385, Mar./Apr. 1991. [4] D. A. Torrey and A. M. A. M. Al-Zamel, A single-phase active power filter for multiple nonlinear load, IEEE Trans. Power Electron., vol. 10, pp. 263272, May 1995.

[5] J. S. Tepper, J. W. Dixon, G. Venegas, and L. Moran, A simple frequency independent method for calculating the reactive and harmonic current in a nonlinear load, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 43, pp. 647654, Dec. 1996. [6] J. Lambert, E. Coelho, J. Vieira, J. Freitas, Jr., and V. J. Farias, Active power filter control based on imposition of input sinusoidal current, in Proc. PESC 97 Record 28th Ann. IEEE Power Electron. Specialists Conf., vol. 1, pp. 406411. [7] T. Maeda and T. Watanabe, A hybrid single-phase active filter for high order harmonic compensation in converter-fed high speed trains, in Proc. IEEE PCC-Nagaoka97, 1997, pp. 711717. [8] C. Weiji, C. Wenhong, and M. Xiaojun, An adaptive noise canceling theory based single-phase shunt active power filter, in Proc. IEEE PCCNagaoka97, 1997, pp. 191196. [9] J. C. Wu and H. L. Jon, Simplified control method for the single-phase active power filter, IEE Proc. Electron. Power Applicat., vol. 143, no. 3, pp. 219224, May 1996. [10] C. Y. Hsu and H.-Y. Wu, A new single-phase active power filter with reduced energy storage capacitor, IEE Proc. Electron. Power Applicat., vol. 143, no. 1, pp. 2328, Jan. 1996. [11] H. L. Jou, J. C. Wu, and H. Y. Chu, New single-phase active power filter, IEE Proc. Electron. Power Applicat., vol. 141, no. 3, pp. 129134, May 1994. [12] H. Auagi et al., Instantaneous reactive power compensation comprising switching devices without energy components, IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 20, pp. 625630, May/June 1984. [13] M. Aredes and E. H. Watanabe, New control algorithms for series and shunt three-phase four-wire active power filter, IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 10, July 1995. [14] S. D. Round and R. M. Duke, Real-time optimization of an active filters performance, IEEE Trans. Ind. Electron., vol. 41, pp. 278284, June 1994.

Luowei Zhou received the B.S. and M.S. degrees, both in electrical engineering, from Chongqing University, Chongqing, China, in 1982 and 1988, respectively. Since 1993, he has been an Associate Professor with the Department of Electrical Engineering, Chongqing University. His major fields of interest include analysis and control of power electronics circuits, the realization of active power filters, power factor correction techniques, and high frequency power conversion.

Zicheng Li received the M.S. degree in electrical engineering from Chongqing University, Chongqing, China, in 1999. Currently, he is with the East Electronics Company, China, as an Electrical Engineer. His research interests include inverters, active power filter, and the application of computers in power systems.