A PASSIVE SERIES, ACTIVE SHUNT FILTER

FOR HIGH POWER APPLICATIONS

Helga SILAGHI∗
Department of Electrical Drives and Automatisation,University of Oradea,

Abstract. This paper presents a hybrid series passive/shunt active power filter system for high power
nonlinear loads. This work is motivated by the fact that the ability of a converter to perform effectively as
an active filter is limited by the power and the frequency distribution of the distortion for which it must
compensate. This system is comprised of a three-phase shunt active filter and series ac line smoothing
reactance installed in front of the target load. The proposed system significantly reduces the required shunt
active filter bandwidth. The space-vector pulse width modulation (PWM) controller is based on a dead-
beat control model. It is implemented digitally using a single 16-bit microcontroller. This controller
requires only the supply current to be monitored, an approach different from conventional methods.

1. INTRODUCTION

The generated harmonic currents from static power converters have a wide
spectrum that includes: fundamental reactive power, third, fifth, seventh, eleventh, and
thirteenth harmonics in large quantities, and other higher frequency harmonics in smaller
percentages. Shunt active power filters are considered effective and practical solutions for
the ever growing problem of power quality. However, the ability of a converter to perform
effectively as an active filter is limited by the power and the frequency distribution of the
distortion for which it must compensate. This paper contributes to the growing body of
knowledge about active filter systems [1] .
Many active filter configurations have been proposed in the literature [7]-[11].
These configurations combine dedicated tuned passive filters and active filters in
series or parallel. The active filter operates in such a manner to improve the filtering
characteristics of the passive filter.
Contrary to these complex and expensive configurations, I propose a simpler
and more practical system. This system is comprised of a three-phase shunt active filter
and series ac line smoothing reactance installed in front of the target load. The passive
element limits the slope of the falling and rising edges of the load current while the
active filter suppresses the residual harmonic currents to the recommended limits.
The filter bandwidth requirement is reduced by the reduction of the load current
bandwidth through the smoothing process performed by the series reactance. As a
result, the proposed system can solve the problem inherent in using only a shunt
passive or active filter. A digital space-vector pulse width modulation (PWM)
controller based on dead-beat regulation is used to control the active filter. The two
challenging tasks associated with this control are model reduction and an efficient
control algorithm implementation.
voltage reference vector.
The proposed space-vector PWM control is implemented using a single Motorola
MC68HC16Z1 digital 16-bit microcontroller. Typical waveforms are given to document
the operation of the filter and its spectral performance.
System performance is verified under different loading conditions. The
performance of the shunt active filter is observed as a function of various system
parameters.

∗
Dr.ing. Helga Silaghi – Conferenţiar

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 Fig. 1. Proposed hybrid system.

2. POWER CIRCUIT DESIGN

The proposed system is comprised of a shunt active filter and a series ac line
smoothing reactance (LNL ) installed in front of the target load. The active filter and
the nonlinear load are connected in parallel and supplied from the main bus as shown
in Fig. 1. The main bus serves as the point of common coupling (PCC) to the utility
grid. The smoothing reactance limits the rate of change in the load current (diNL/dt).
This reduces the high frequency harmonic content in the load current. The active
filter, in turn, operates to suppress the residual harmonic currents to the
recommended limits by injecting a compensating current.

A. Three-Phase Shunt Active Power Filter

The three-phase active power filter is based on the voltage-source inverter
(VSI) topology. The filter consists of a six-switch inverter bridge, filter inductance
and dc bus capacitor. The current that must be supported by each switch is the
maximum filter inductor current (iF). This current is easily determined through a
simple model of the nonlinear load (iNL).
Applying Kirchhoff's current law at the main bus node in Fig. 1 then reveals
the filter current required to produce a sinusoidal line current (iS) given the average
power supported by the load. That is, the filter inductor current is
iF = iS − iNL , (1)
where the line current must support the average power consumed by the load and
active filter.
The voltage that must be supported by each switch is the maximum voltage that
appears across the capacitor. The determination of the peak capacitor voltage is more
complicated than the determination of the peak inductor current. This is because the
capacitor current is switched in a complicated manner as the controllable switches
operate to force iF into the correct shape.
The dc bus nominal voltage (Vdc) must be greater than or equal to line-line
voltage peak in order to actively control iF.
There is a fundamental compromise in the selection of the filter inductance LF.
The ability to track the desired source current improves as the filter inductance is made
smaller. As the inductor is made smaller, however, a higher switching frequency is
required to keep the ripple in the line current acceptably small.

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 A practical choice of LF guarantees that the active filter can generate a current
with a slope equal to the maximum slope of the load current. The upper bound on
filter inductance is:
2
V − V̂xn
LF ≤ 3 dc (2)
diNL x
max
dt
where Vˆxn and iNLx are the peak line-neutral voltage and the load current of phase x,
respectively. The lower bound on inductor size is dictated by the acceptable level of
switching frequency ripple current.
The required capacitor size (C) is dictated by the maximum acceptable voltage
ripple. A good initial guess of the value of C is
t
max ∫ iF dt
0
C≥ (3)
∆vC max

where ∆vC is the maximum acceptable voltage ripple. Later, these values of LF and
max
C can be adjusted based on simulation or laboratory results.

B. The Main Bus and the Nonlinear Loa

The main bus serves as the point of common coupling for the prototype
system; a schematic for the main bus is shown in Fig. 2. The switching ripple filter at
the main bus is required to sink switching frequency current harmonics produced by
the active filter inverter, thereby reducing the high frequency currents in the supply.
Typically, this filter is placed in front of the active filter inverter. This increases the
possibility of interaction between the switching ripple filter impedance and the inverter
harmonic current.
The consequence of this is harmonic voltage distortion generated at PCC due to
the sinking of unwanted harmonics into the filter.

Fig. 2. Main bus schematic.

To solve this problem the filter is relocated at the main bus where only the
fundamental and switching frequency components exist at significant level, provided that
the active filter is closely tracking the desired supply current.
The implemented filter is a second-order band-pass filter tuned at the active filter
switching frequency. Fig. 2(b) shows the implemented filter. It sinks the dominant
inverter switching frequency ripple by the resonance of LPF and CPF. The damping
resistor should be small enough to reduce the voltage distortion problem, but large enough
to provide adequate damping to prevent undesired oscillations.

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 An artificial supply reactance LS is incorporated to represent a typical utility
transformer reactance of 0.065 p.u. This reactance is used to improve the switching ripple
filter performance and to regulate the supply current.
The representative nonlinear load used in this experiment is a 15 kVA phase-
controlled rectifier with RL load, as shown in Fig. 1.
This load has two distinct features. First, its current has sharp falling and rising
edges. This complicates the compensation task for the active filter. A smoothing reactor
is placed in front of the rectifier bridge to slow down the commutation process of the
load. This reactor constitutes the passive part of the proposed hybrid filter system.
Second, the phase-controlled rectifier draws significant fundamental reactive
power, the magnitude of which is a function of the bridge firing angle.

The size of the smoothing reactance depends on the maximum allowable load current
slope. The maximum nonlinear load current is solely function of the supply voltage peak
di Vˆ
max NL = LL (4)
dt 2 LNL
The value of the smoothing reactance is determined as a function of the filter inductance LF
by substituting the above expression in (2)
3m
LNL ≥ LF (5)
4 − 2 3m
where m(= VLL Vdc ) is the modulation index.

3. EXPERIMENTAL EVALUATION

The system shown in Fig.1 was experimentally tested to verify the concepts
addressed in previous sections and to learn more about the operation of the hybrid series
passive/shunt active filter system.
The per unit bases for the supply line-line voltage and the system power are 208 Vrms
and 15 kVA, respectively.
The line reactance LS is 0.065 pu (500 µH) and the smoothing reactance LNL is 0.13
pu (1 mH). The active filter dc bus capacitance is 3900 µF, the dc bus voltage is nominally
320 V, the filter inductance LF is 0.038 pu (0.294 mH), the sampling frequency (fsarn) is
10.08 kHz and the control gain (λ) is 1.045.
The supply voltage has a THD equal to 2.24% due to background distortion.
However, the total harmonic distortion (THD) and power factor (kp) are based on a pure
sine-wave for the voltage.
That is, distortion voltages present in the supply voltage have not been considered
with regard to the calculation of THD or k p .

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 (a) (a)

(b) (b)
Fig. 3 Line current with smoothing reactor but Fig. 4 Line current with the smoothing
without the active filter. reactor and the active filter.

Fig.5 Line current THD, third, fifth and 17th

harmonics
Profiles as the load firing angle increases

Fig.4 shows the supply current with both smoothing reactance and active filter in
service. The active filter forces all supply current harmonics to be within the
recommended limits, except for the small violation by the twenty-third harmonic. The fifth
harmonic is dramatically reduced to less than 1 % of the fundamental.
Figs.5 and 6 document the performance of the filter for different loading
conditions. The filter is more sensitive to variation in the load firing angle (αNL) than the
variation in the load resistor (RNL).

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 Fig.6 Line current THD, fifth, eleventh, and Fig.7 Line current THD, fifth, seventh, and
thirteenth harmonics profiles as the load power seventeenth harmonics profiles as the active
increases. Harmonics are reported as a filter switching frequency increases. Harmonics
percentage of the fundamental. are reported as a percentage of the fundamental.

We conclude from Fig.7 that the filter performance can be significantly improved by
decreasing the filter inductance and increasing the switching frequency.

4. CONCLUZIOS

This paper has detailed the implementation of hybrid series passive/shunt active
filter system for high power applications. This system is comprised of a three-phase
shunt active filter and series ac line smoothing reactance installed in front of the target
load. This system requires the minimum number of current sensors for its implementation
where only the supply current is monitored. The design of both power and control stages
was addressed at a detailed level.
The proposed system has the following characteristics:
1) It reduces the load distortion bandwidth, thereby lowering the bandwidth
required of the active filter.
2) System simplicity is improved due to the development of the reduced
dead-beat control based active filter model.
3) An efficient and flexible digital control scheme that can be implemented
in a single 16-bit microcontroller.
The digitally implemented current regulator is based on dead-beat control. An
analytical approach to compute the lookup table index was proven to be effective in
saving a considerable amount of the processor time. Sampling the input data consumes
about 52% of the total execution time.

References
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vol. 34, pp. 508-517, May/June 1998
[2] S. Bhattacharya, T. Frank, D. Divan, and B. Banerjee, "Parallel activefilter system implementation
and design issues for utility interface of adjustable speed drive systems," in Proc. IEEE IAS Annu.
Meeting Conf. Rec., 1996, pp. 1032-1039
[3] H. Silaghi, “Contributions regarding power flows in electrical drive systems with induction machine
and their effect on energy quality”, doctoral dissertation, Oradea,1999
[4] H. Akagi, Y. Tsukamoto, and A. Nabae, "Analysis and design of an active power filter using quad-
series voltage source PWM converters," IEEE Trans. Ind. Applicat., vol. 26, pp. 93-98, Jan. 1990
[5] J. Hafner, M. Aredes, and K. Heumann, "A shunt active power filter applied to high voltage
distribution lines," IEEE Trans. Power Delivery,vol. 12, pp. 266-272, Jan. 1997

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