Control and Performance of a Cascaded Shunt Active Power Filter for Aircraft Electric Power System

With the progress of more electric aircraft, introducing active power filter (APF) technology into the aircraft power system to improve its quality and reliability catches growing interest. In this paper, based on the analysis and modeling of the shunt APF with close-loop control, a feedforward compensation path of load current is proposed to improve the dynamic performance of the APF. The two H-bridge cascaded inverter is selected for the aeronautical APF (AAPF). Justifications for topology choosing and corresponding system control method are given. Furthermore, the global framework and operation principle of the proposed AAPF are presented in detail. A prototype with the load power of 7.2 kVA is built and tested in the laboratory. Experimental results verify the feasibility of the proposed AAPF and the high performance of the control strategy during steady-state and dynamic operations.