Reactive Power and Current Harmonic Control Using a Dual Hybrid Power Filter for Unbalanced Non-Linear Loads

An important power quality issue is related to current harmonic components demanded by non-linear loads. A solution to mitigate this issue is to use hybrid power filters (HPFs), that apply low power active filters with passive filters. Some dual-converter topologies have been shown to be attractive due to a better compensation performance compared with single filters, where the HPFs give a reactive power support (an extra feature) together with harmonic compensation. On the other hand, the drawback of dual converters is the high number of active switches. Besides that, due to the high number of unbalanced non-linear loads connected to the electrical grid, triplen harmonics can appear. However, traditional HPFs do not compensate triplen harmonics, which usually have considerable values. Therefore, in this paper, a dual HPF based on the nine-switch inverter (DHPF-NSI) is proposed to compensate current harmonics and to provide reactive power support. The NSI presents a reduced number of switches when compared with classical dual topologies. The compensation of the third harmonic caused by unbalanced nonlinear loads was also inserted in the control system. Experimental results are presented for the DHPF-NSI in order to demonstrate the reactive power and harmonic compensation performances.