This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been

fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/TPWRD.2015.2457831, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery
1

Design Method for 3rd Order High-Pass Filter

Tianyu Ding, Student Member, IEEE, Wilsun Xu, Fellow, IEEE, and Hao Liang, Member, IEEE

AbstractThird order high-pass harmonic filter has been
widely used in industry. However, technically-sound design
method has not been well established for the filter. This letter
presents a complete design method along with simple design
formulas. Comparative case studies show that the proposed
design method will result in minimal fundamental frequency loss
for the filter and a significantly smaller auxiliary filter capacitor.
Index TermsPassive filters, 3rd order filter, harmonics.
I. INTRODUCTION
II. ACCEPTED DESIGN EQUATIONS
As explained earlier, four equations (or conditions) are
required to determine four component parameters (C1, C2, L
and R). Two conditions are well understood and accepted by
industry and research community:
Condition 1: The reactive power output of the filter shall be
equal to the required amount QF. This condition yields the
following design equation:
C1 QF / 1V 2 (1)

T hird order high-pass filter is widely used to filter high

order harmonics such as the 11th, 13th etc. for both
industrial systems and HVDC links [1-4]. The filter is shown
where 1 is the power frequency and V is the rated voltage.
Condition 2: The filter is tuned to frequency H. This means
in Fig. 1 along with its frequency response. For low order that L is resonant with C1, which leads to:
harmonics that is less than the tuning frequency, the filter's L
branch dominates so it behaves as a single-tuned filter. For L 1/ H2 C1 (2)
high order harmonics, the C2+R branch dominates so it
Equation (2) establishes the 2nd design equation.
behaves as a resistor R in series with C1. The purpose of C2 is
to reduce the filter loss at the fundamental frequency [2, 4].
III. DESIGN CONDITION BASED ON LOSS MINIMIZATION
The objective of C2 is to reduce the filter loss at the
C1
fundamental frequency. It is, therefore, logical to use loss
Impedance

C2
minimization to establish the 3rd design equation. The
L fundamental frequency power loss of the filter is as follows:
R

R PFloss Re V 2 / Z F (1 ) V 2 A16 / A16 B14 C12 1 (3)

Frequency
Fig. 1. Third order high-pass filter configuration and its frequency response. where Z F (1 ) is the filter impedance at power frequency and
In spite of its wide acceptance in industry, to authors' best
A C12C22 L2 R
knowledge, design method for this filter has not been
B C1 L 2C1C2 LR 2C1C2 L C2 L
2 2 2 2 2 2 2
established. For example, several literatures use the condition (4)

C C2 R 2 LC2 2 LC1
of C1=C2 for filter design and yet no justification has been 2 2

given [1, 2, 4]. Reference [3] showed filter parameters of

C1C2 without explaining how C2 was determined. Moreover,
the filter consists of four elements. Four design conditions or
equations are therefore needed to determine their parameters.
So far, only two conditions (reactive power output and tuning
frequency) are generally agreed upon by designers and users.
These two conditions are not sufficient to determine all four
parameters. The objective of this letter is to address the above
design gap by presenting a complete design method for the 3rd
order high-pass filter.
This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering
Research Council of Canada and Alberta Power Industry Consortium.
The authors are with the department of Electrical and Computer
Engineering, University of Alberta, Edmonton, AB T6G 2V4, Canada (email:
tding@ualberta.ca; wxu@ualberta.ca; hao2@ualberta.ca).
Since C1 and L can be found using (1) and (2), only C2 and
R are to be determined. The problem can be formulated as
finding an optimal solution for both R and C2:
min PFloss f ( R, C2 )
(5)
s.t. g1 ( R, C2 ) 0 & g 2 ( R, C2 ) 0 & g3 ( R, C2 ) 0
where g1 ( R, C2 ) C2 C1 , g2 ( R, C2 ) C1 L / ( R2C1 L) C2 ,
g3 ( R, C2 ) L R2 C1 .
The constraints g1, g2 and g3 of the above formulation are
established based on the requirement that the filter impedance
must be inductive for frequencies higher than the tuning
frequency. Due to space limitation, the derivation of these
constraints is omitted.

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This article has been accepted for publication in a future issue of this journal, but has not been fully edited. Content may change prior to final publication. Citation information: DOI
10.1109/TPWRD.2015.2457831, IEEE Transactions on Power Delivery
2

The above optimization problem can be solved using the
following KKT optimality condition [5]:
f ( R* , C2* ) 1g1 ( R* , C2* ) 2g 2 ( R* , C2* )
3g3 ( R* , C2* ) 0
where ( R* , C2* ) is the optimal solution and 1 , 2 and 3 are
KKT multipliers which should be nonnegative.
Through extensive mathematical operations, an analytical
solution for the above problem has been found. It is shown
below. This results in the 3rd design equation:
C2 C1 L / ( R2C1 L)
procedure is very simple. The proposed design method has
been compared with the design result using the condition of
C2 C1 and with the actual filter installation documented in
(6) [3] for a HVDC link (Corisca tapping substation). The same
design input data are used for the comparison. They are QF=10
Mvar, V= 90 kV, a%=53.5 for 7th harmonic, ZS=j22.5 . The
harmonic losses are calculated assuming 1.5% background
voltage harmonics for the 3rd to 13th harmonics.
The results are shown in Table I and Fig. 3. It can be seen
that the proposed design method results in much less power
loss. In addition capacitor C2 is significant smaller, which
leads to reduced cost and space for the filter.
(7)
TABLE I: DESIGN RESULTS FOR DIFFERENT DESIGN METHODS

IV. DESIGN CONDITION BASED ON HARMONIC REDUCTION Parameters

Actual
C2=C1
Optimal
th Case [3] R & C2
The 4 design condition can be application dependent, such
C1 (F) 3.79 3.79 3.79
as reducing harmonic voltage or current. In this letter, we
adopt the harmonic voltage reduction (at the tuning frequency) Component C2 (F) 4.73 3.79 1.05
as the design condition. As shown in Fig. 2, the harmonic Parameters L (mH) 82.40 82.40 82.40
voltage at the filter location can be determined as:
R () 330.00 340.64 316.12
Z F (H ) Tuning Harmonic Order 5.70 5.70 5.70
VF (H ) VS (H ) (8)
Z S (H ) Z F (H ) th
7 Harmonic Voltage Reduction (%) 53.5 53.5 53.5
Fundamental Frequency Loss (kW) 5.12 3.57 0.29
VS ( ) : System background
VF ( )
Z S ( ) harmonic voltage
Harmonic Frequency Loss (kW) 23.22 21.51 9.96
Z S ( ): System equivalent
VS ( ) Z F ( ) F harmonic impedance
1000
System Filter Z F ( ): Filter equivalent Actual Case
harmonic impedance C2=C1
800
Optimal R & C2
Fig. 2. Equivalent circuit of the system and filter.
600
ZF( )

The goal is to reduce the above voltage by a% in

400
comparison with the voltage before the filter is installed (i.e.,
VF0 (H ) ), which result in the 4th design equation: 200

VF (H ) 1 a%VF0 (H ) (9) 0
0 10 20 30 40 50
Harmonic Order
Fig. 3. Comparison of filter impedance characteristic.
The above design equation can be solved analytically for
the case where the system impedance can be approximated as a
VI. CONCLUSIONS
reactance in the form of Z S (H ) jnH X S , where XS is the
This letter has proposed a design concept for the 3rd order
short-circuit reactance of the system and nH H / 1 . This
high-pass filter. A complete and simple design method in
condition can be met for many industrial facilities which are terms of four design formulas has been established
supplied by a service transformer. The reactance of the service accordingly. Case study results have shown that the proposed
transformer dominates Z S . For such systems, the resulting method can result in minimal fundamental frequency loss for
design equation is: the filter and a significantly smaller filter capacitor C2.

R02 4 R02 4nH X S R0 7nH2 X S2 1 a%

2
3 2 R3 VII. REFERENCES
R R0 0 (10)
2 nH X s 2nH X s 1 a% [1] CIGRE WG 14.03, "AC harmonic filter and reactive compensation for
HVDC: a general survey," Electra, no. 63, 1979.
[2] J. Arrillaga, D. A. Bradley, and P. S. Bodger, Power System Harmonics,
where R0 L / C1 John Wiley & Sons Ltd, 1985.
[3] CIGRE WG 14.03, "AC harmonic filters and reactive compensation for
HVDC with particular reference to non-characteristic harmonics," Tech.
V. SUMMARY AND SAMPLE RESULTS Rep. TB-065, Jun. 1990.
The proposed design method can be summarized as [4] Y. Xiao, "The method for designing the third order filter." in Proc. 8th
IEEE ICHQP, Oct. 1998, pp. 139-142.
follows: determine C1 using (1), L using (2), R using (9) or [5] S. Boyd and L. Vandenberghe, Convex Optimization, Cambridge
(10), and finally C2 using (7). It can be seen that the design University Press, 2004.

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