IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 12, NO.

2, MARCH 1997

311

Three-Phase Four-Wire Shunt Active Filter Control Strategies

Maur cio Aredes, Student Member, IEEE J urgen H afner, and Klemens Heumann, Member, IEEE
Abstract This paper describes a three-phase four-wire shunt active power lter using a conventional three-leg converter, without the need of power supply at dc bus. Two approaches have been developed to control the active lter. Both control strategies consider harmonics and zero sequence components in the voltage and current simultaneously. The rst one provides constant power and the second one sinusoidal current to the source, even under unbalanced voltage conditions. Simulation results from a complete model of shunt active lter are presented to validate and compare the control strategies. Index TermsActive power lters, active power line conditioners, FACTS, instantaneous active and reactive power.

sinusoidal, balanced currents to the source, even when the system voltage is distorted and/or unbalanced. The performance of both control strategies will be compared and discussed in details through simulation results from a complete model of shunt active lter including the threeleg converter and its pulse width modulation (PWM) current control. II. PWM CONVERTERS FOR THREE-PHASE FOUR-WIRE SYSTEMS In this section, two congurations of Voltage Source Inverters (VSI), which can be used in three-phase four-wire systems, will be presented. The fundamental difference between the VSI of Fig. 1(a) and (b) is the number of power semiconductor devices. A conventional three-leg converter is used in Fig. 1(a) and the ac neutral wire is connected directly to the midpoint of the dc bus, while in Fig. 1(b) the ac neutral is provided through a fourth leg. Since the congurations have PWM current control, they behave as controlled current source. The ac currents generated by the VSI have some high-order harmonics at the switching frequency, which can be easily ltered using a small passive lter ( and in Fig. 1). Ideally, the currents track accurately their references . The controllability of the four switch-leg inverter topology [Fig. 1(b)] is better than the split-capacitor inverter topology [Fig. 1(a)] [2], [3]. However, the conventional threeleg converter is preferred because of its lower number of power semiconductor devices [10], [11]. The problems related to the dc capacitor voltage control by using the topology of Fig. 1(a) will be discussed below and a simple control circuit will be proposed later. Fig. 2 shows a typical motion of the -phase VSI current controlled by a hysteresis-based PWM current controller. If the current references are assumed to be composed from zero sequence component, the line currents will return through the ac neutral wire. This forces, in the splitcapacitor inverter topology, the current of each phase to ow either through or through and to return through the ac neutral wire. The currents can ow in both directions through the switches and capacitors. Table I summarizes the conditions that cause voltage variations in the capacitors and for a zero sequence current reference in the split-capacitor inverter topology. When rises and decreases, but not with equal ratio because the positive and negative values of are different and depend on the instantaneous values of the ac phase voltages. The inverse occurs when . The dc

I. INTRODUCTION CTIVE power lters for three-phase systems without neutral conductor have been successfully developed, and nowadays some commercial products are already available. Although three-phase four-wire active lters have been introduced in the 1980s [1], the development is still in its infancy and no experimental prototype has been put in operation outside the universities. Some researches appoint the four-leg converter topology as the best alternative to implement a three-phase four-wire active power lter [2][4]. Alternatively, the authors present here an interesting solution that uses a conventional three-leg converter to implement a three-phase four-wire shunt active lter. The instantaneous power theory ( theory) has been used successfully to control active power lters for three-phase systems [5][7]. This theory was extended in [8] and [9] for applications in three-phase four-wire systems. Here, a critical comparison between two control strategies that provide load current compensation including zero sequence components and considering distorted system voltage is carried out. The rst one, the constant source instantaneous power strategy, was introduced in [9]. It compensates the current of a nonlinear load such that the compensated current shall draw a constant active power from the network, even if the system voltage is already distorted. However, its dynamics within a complete simulation model of shunt active lter has not been reported so far and there are some difcult aspects that should be evidenced. The second approach is the sinusoidal source current strategy. It compensates currents of a nonlinear load to provide
Manuscript received January 26, 1995; revised September 6, 1996. etrica. M. Aredes is with Cepel-Centro de Pesquisas de Energia El J. H afner and K. Heumann are with Technische Universit at Berlin, Institut f ur Allgemeine ElektrotechnikSekr. E2, 10587 Berlin, Germany. Publisher Item Identier S 0885-8993(97)01851-6.

08858993/97$10.00 1997 IEEE

312

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 12, NO. 2, MARCH 1997

(a)

Fig. 3. Three-phase four-wire shunt active power lter using a conventional three-leg converter.

(b) Fig. 1. Three-phase four-wire PWM converters: (a) three-leg converter (split-capacitor inverter topology) and (b) four-leg converter (four switch-leg inverter topology).

voltage, as well as the voltage difference ( ) will oscillate not only at the switching frequency, but also at the corresponding frequency of that is being generated by the VSI. In the example given in Fig. 2, the phase current causes voltage variations such that at the end of the period the voltage is higher and lower. If a dynamic offset level is added to both limits of the hysteresis-band, it is possible to control the capacitor voltage difference and to keep it within an acceptable tolerance margin. For instance, a negative offset in Fig. 2 counteracts the above voltage variation. Later, a simple control scheme will be proposed to do it. III. SHUNT THREE-PHASE FOUR-WIRE ACTIVE FILTER The shunt three-phase four-wire active power lter conguration that will be explored in this paper is presented in Fig. 3. It is composed from a conventional three-leg VSI with a dynamic hysteresis-band PWM current control and an active lter controller that realizes an instantaneous control algorithm. The inputs of this controller are the instantaneous phase voltages and line currents of the load. Its outputs are the instantaneous three-phase current references and . The voltage regulator supervises the dc capacitor voltages and provides two control signals, and , as shown in Fig. 3. The signal compensates for losses in the PWM converter, which tends to discharge the dc capacitors and . The signal is the dynamic offset level used to control the capacitor voltage difference, as will be seen later. IV. SHUNT ACTIVE FILTER CONTROL To control the active lter, two approaches are considered: 1) the constant source instantaneous power strategy that provides constant real power to the source, even under unbalanced voltage source, and 2) the sinusoidal source currents strategy that provides sinusoidal currents to the source, even under unbalanced voltage source. In both strategies the whole zero-sequence current of the load is compensated, but it is impossible to satisfy simultaneously both conditions:

Fig. 2. Hysteresis-band PWM current control.

TABLE I VARIATION CONDITIONS FOR THE CAPACITOR VOLTAGES

VC 1

AND

VC 2

voltage variation depends also on the shape of the current reference and the hysteresis bandwidth. Therefore, the total dc

AREDES et al.: THREE-PHASE FOUR-WIRE SHUNT ACTIVE FILTER CONTROL STRATEGIES

313

sinusoidal currents and constant power at the source if the system voltage is unbalanced and/or distorted. A. Constant Source Instantaneous Power Strategy The physical meaning of the instantaneous active and reactive power ( - theory) will be briey summarized below for better understanding the optimal load ow conditions that guides the realization of this control strategy. The active lter controller of Fig. 3 uses the - - transformation and the instantaneous power dened in this reference frame [5][7]. The instantaneous voltages and currents of a nonlinear load are transformed into the - - axis by

(1)
Fig. 4. Physical meaning of the instantaneous powers dened in the reference frame.

- -0

(2)

and are phase voltages and where line currents. The real power , the imaginary power sequence power are dened as

and

are

and the zero

(3) The physical meaning of these instantaneous powers is detailed in [8] and [9], and Fig. 4 summarizes those concepts. Three points should be remarked. The total instantaneous energy ow per time unit, that is, the instantaneous active three-phase power is always equal to the sum of the real power and the zero-sequence power. The zero-sequence components of voltages and currents do not contribute to the instantaneous powers and . The imaginary power represents an energy that can be constant or not and is being exchanged between the phases of the system. This means that does not contribute to the energy transfer between source and load at any time. An optimal power ow can be provided to the source, even under unbalanced and nonsinusoidal voltage conditions. This occurs when the active lter compensates the powers (alternating part of the real power), and of the load. Fig. 5 shows the optimal power ow in terms of - - coordinates. It shows that the source supplies only the average real power to the load and the average real power to the active lter. The additional power is equal to the sum of , to cover the converter losses and , to provide energy balance inside the active lter. If an active lter is

Fig. 5. Optimal power ow related to the

- -0 reference frame.

used for compensating , it has to compensate fully the power , because it is impossible to produce separately [9]. The zero sequence power that the active lter from supplies to the load can be taken as a balanced real power from the source, since it is always possible to generate with , even under nonsinusoidal conditions. The entire control block diagram of the three-phase fourwire shunt active lter is presented in Fig. 6. The control circuit as shown in this gure realizes the constant source instantaneous power strategy. There are two shaded areas involving the 800-Hz cutoff frequency low-pass lters and the low-pass lter for the power . These areas will be changed in the next section to adapt the circuit to the sinusoidal source current strategy. Unfortunately, the phase voltages could not be used directly in the control because of instability problems. It was veried that resonance between the source impedance and the small passive lter ( and in Fig. 3) can appear. Therefore, lowpass lters were used with a relatively high cutoff frequency (800 Hz) to attenuate voltage harmonics at the resonance frequency, which is higher than 800 Hz. These lters turn

314

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 12, NO. 2, MARCH 1997

Fig. 6. Control block diagram of the shunt active lter.

the system stable, but also degenerate the compensation characteristics of the shunt active lter, as will be shown later. The - - transformation box of Fig. 6 realizes (1)(3). Two lters with 50-Hz cutoff frequency separate the powers and from and , respectively. These signals are used in the - current reference box, which realizes the following equations: (4) where (5) Finally, the - - inverse transformation box calculates the instantaneous current references to the PWM current control as

with a cutoff frequency at 20 Hz are inserted in the voltage regulator to render it insensitive to the fundamental frequency (50-Hz) voltage variations, which appear when the active lter compensates the fundamental zero sequence current of the load, even when , as explained in Fig. 2. Note that the compensation of and of the load also causes voltage variation (see Fig. 5). Further, this slower feedback loop is also useful to correct voltage variations due to compensation errors that occur during transient response of the shunt active lter. Due to the same reasons above, another low-pass lter is applied in the circuit that generates the signal . In this case, the ltered voltage difference produces according to the following limit function:

(7)

(6)

is the dc bus voltage reference. The signal where actuates as a dynamic offset level that is added to both hysteresis-band limits in the PWM current control, as shown in Fig. 6, which is upper hysteresis band limit lower hysteresis band limit (8)

With this approach the active lter supplies the whole of the load. If zero sequence voltage is not present in the system, the zero sequence power is always zero. In this case, the zero sequence current of the load is compensated without ). the need of energy balance inside the active lter ( The signal is used in (5) as an average real power and is obtained from the voltage regulator, as shown in Fig. 6. The sum of and is compared to a dc bus voltage reference ) and the deviation is ltered and multiplied by , to ( match the desired amplitude for the ac current component that neutralizes the dc bus voltage variations. Low-pass lters

is the instantaneous current reference where given by (6) and is a xed semi-bandwidth of the hysteresis control. Thus, the signal shifts the hysteresis-band to change the switching times such that rises rises and lowers (9) and lowers

AREDES et al.: THREE-PHASE FOUR-WIRE SHUNT ACTIVE FILTER CONTROL STRATEGIES

315

Fig. 7. Block diagram of the fundamental positive-sequence voltage detector.

B. Sinusoidal Source Current Strategy The active lter can compensate load currents under unbalanced system voltages to provide sinusoidal, balanced currents to the source but now, disregarding the optimal power ow proposed in Fig. 5. For this purpose, a positive sequence detector must replace the 800-Hz cutoff frequency low-pass lters (shaded area in Fig. 6). The phase angle and frequency of the fundamental positive sequence voltage component ( ) must be accurately determined by the detector, in order to allow the active lter to compensate the fundamental reactive power of the load. The active lter must produce ac currents ( ) orthogonal to the voltage component . Otherwise it would also produce active power. The positive sequence voltage detector as presented in Fig. 7 not only satises the above constraints, but also determines correctly the amplitude from . First, an integrated circuit with a VCO chip (PLL circuit) should determine accurately the fundamental frequency ( ) of the system voltage, which may be unbalanced and contain harmonics. Afterwards, the fundamental frequency is used as input to a sine-wave generator that produces three auxiliary signals ( ) to be used as fundamental positive sequence currents along the detector of Fig. 7. The phase angle and the amplitude of these sine signals are not important,except that they must keep 120 among themselves and have equal amplitudes. Again, the voltage detector uses an algorithm based on the instantaneous powers dened in the - - reference frame. However, the average values of the real ( ) and imaginary ( ) powers are considered here. The average powers and are composed only from the fundamental positive sequence voltage , since the auxiliary currents are also composed only from a fundamental positive sequence component. In this case, the inuence of the fundamental negative sequence voltage and harmonics will appear in the high-frequency components of and . The - voltage reference box of Fig. 7 calculates (10) Finally, the - - instantaneous values ( ) of the fundamental positive sequence voltage, are determined in the - - inverse transformation box, without errors in the

amplitude or phase angle, as

(11)

If the voltages calculated in (11) are considered as input to the main control circuit (Fig. 6), instead of the ltered voltages used previously, now the compensating powers and will include the fundamental negative sequence power, the fundamental reactive power, and the harmonic power. Thus, the active lter controller handles the load currents as connected to a sinusoidal, balanced voltage source. In this case, if , and are compensated by the shunt active lter, the source currents become sinusoidal, balanced, and composed only from the active portion of the fundamental positive sequence current of the load that is in phase with . Therefore, the sinusoidal source current strategy is realized doing the following changes in Fig. 6: 1) to replace the 800-Hz low-pass lters of Fig. 6 with the circuit of Fig. 7; 2) to remove the 50-Hz low-pass lter that obtains in Fig. 6, because the new input voltages and do not contain any zero-sequence voltage component ( ) and is always zero. At this point, it should be remarked that the voltage regulator of Fig. 3 now has an additional task besides those described previously, that is, it should correct errors in power compensation. This errors arise because the feedforward control in the main circuit is now unable to supervise the zero sequence power. Another kind of error will also appear. To understand this point, a simple example follows. Suppose that the system voltages and load currents are composed only from fundamental positive and negative sequence components. As expected, the active lter will supply the whole negative sequence current ( ) to the load. However, the ac voltage at the shunt active lter contains also negative sequence component at same frequency. So if it is not orthogonal to , the active lter will supply/absorb a nonzero average negative-sequence power. Since the power compensation error causes voltage variation at the dc bus,

316

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 12, NO. 2, MARCH 1997

MAIN PARAMETERS

OF THE

TABLE II SIMULATED SYSTEM BASED

ON

FIG. 3

the slower feedback control loop of the voltage regulator will sense it and will change the signal to make the active lter to absorb/supply a positive-sequence power from the ac network to neutralize the above voltage variation. This occurs because the active lter current references are calculated only from [ of (11)]. V. SIMULATED RESULTS A complete model of the shunt active lter was implemented in a digital simulator and the most important results will be presented to compare both control strategies. The fundamental frequency of the system is 50 Hz. The source voltages are composed from arbitrarily chosen phasors in terms of symmetrical components. The rms amplitude and phase angle of these phasors are V
Fig. 9. Load currents. Fig. 8. System voltages.

V The other main system parameters based on Fig. 3 are summarized in Table II. Two simulations that use the same system parameters, but realize different control strategy, will be shown. The phase voltages at the load were almost the same for both simulation cases and Fig. 8 shows the voltages for the constant source instantaneous power case. The load current was the same for both simulations (Fig. 9). The diode bridge was connected at ms and the controlled (thyristor) bridges were connected after ms, according to their ring angles (see Table II). Then, at ms, the ring pulses of the three-phase thyristor bridge were blocked, as shown in Fig. 9. ms. Fig. 10 shows The active lter was connected at the ltered (no switching frequency) line currents of the active lter for the sinusoidal source current case. For the constant

source instantaneous power case, the current of the active lter is presented in Fig. 11. These gures show that both control strategies have the same dynamic behavior. The compensated currents that ow through the source are shown in Fig. 12(a) for the constant source instantaneous power case and in Fig. 12(b) for the sinusoidal source current case. Although both approaches provide fast response and equally compensate the neutral current of the load, they cannot avoid the harmonic currents that are excited by the harmonic voltages of the source and are owing to the passive lter F ). Nevertheless, from a harmonic point ( of view, the sinusoidal source current strategy offers a better compensation for the source currents. Due to this reason, this control strategy has been preferred and experimental results from a laboratory prototype using this control strategy were reported in [11].

AREDES et al.: THREE-PHASE FOUR-WIRE SHUNT ACTIVE FILTER CONTROL STRATEGIES

317

Fig. 13. Three-phase instantaneous powers.

Fig. 10. Active lter currents when the sinusoidal source current strategy is applied. Fig. 14. Imaginary powers.

Fig. 11. Active lter current when the constant source instantaneous power strategy is applied. Fig. 15. Capacitor voltages at the dc bus.

(a)

(b) Fig. 12. Currents of the power supply compensated by (a) the constant source instantaneous power strategy and (b) the sinusoidal source current strategy.

Fig. 13 compares the three-phase instantaneous power ( ) of the load with the powers from the compensated line currents, for both control strategies. The constant source instantaneous power strategy (pconst curve) should present a perfectly smoothed instantaneous power at source side. Unfortunately, it presented a poor performance due to the presence

of the 800-Hz cutoff frequency low-pass lters (Butterworth Filter fth order), applied in the measured system voltages to solve problems of instability. For the level of voltage distortion considered, the need of low-pass lter in the measured voltages in case of using the constant source instantaneous power strategy causes power compensation errors at the same order of magnitude as the sinusoidal source current strategy. The average switching frequency of the PWM inverter is about 13 kHz, and the losses in the snubber circuits are so high as the average load power. The imaginary powers illustrated in Fig. 14 were calculated from the same voltages and currents used in Fig. 13. The curve for the constant power strategy contains a small negative average value because the 800-Hz cutoff frequency lters delay the measured system voltages. This does not occur in the sinusoidal source current strategy and conrms the efciency of the positive sequence voltage detector (Fig. 7). The dc capacitor voltage variations were almost similar in both cases, as shown in Fig. 15. It is possible to see a 50Hz component that is caused by the zero-sequence current compensation, as explained early. A discharge of the dc capacitors occurred when the loads is connected. Contrarily, an overvoltage occurred when the three-phase thyristor bridge is disconnected. VI. CONCLUSIONS Two control schemes for a shunt three-phase four-wire active power lter employing a conventional three-leg con-

318

IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 12, NO. 2, MARCH 1997

verter were developed and a critical comparison between both approaches was carried out. The three-leg converter topology was preferred due to its lower number of power semiconductor devices, and a dynamic hysteresis current control was developed to overcome the problems related with the dc voltage difference between dc capacitors. A three-phase active lter without neutral wire could be realized using a two-leg converter if the split-capacitor inverter topology and the dynamic hysteresis current control are applied, or generally use ( )-leg converter in -wire systems. Although the constant source instantaneous power strategy is easier to realize, all simulation results indicated that the sinusoidal source current strategy should be the best alternative to control a shunt active power lter. Experimental results using this control strategy were successfully obtained and already reported in [11]. REFERENCES
[1] G. Dinykel and R. Gretsch, Kompensator f ur oberschwingungen und blindleistung, ETZ Archiv., vol. 9, no. 1, pp. 914, 1987. [2] C. A. Quinn and N. Mohan, Active ltering of harmonic currents in three-phase, four-wire systems with three-phase and single-phase nonlinear loads, in APEC92Applied Power Elec. Conf., 1992, pp. 829836. [3] C. A. Quinn, N. Mohan, and H. Mehta, A four-wire, current-controlled converter provides harmonic neutralization in three-phase, four-wire systems, in APEC93Applied Power Elec. Conf., 1993, pp. 841846. [4] D. Sutanto and M. Bou-Rabee, Active power lters with reactive power compensation capability, in Int. Power Eng. Conf., Singapore, Mar. 1993, pp. 7378. [5] H. Akagi, Y. Kanazawa, and A. Nabae, Generalized theory of the instantaneous reactive power in three-phase circuits, in IPEC83Int. Power Elec. Conf., Tokyo, Japan, 1983, pp. 13751386. [6] H. Akagi, Y. Kanazawa, and A. Nabae, Instantaneous reactive power compensator comprising switching devices without energy storage components, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., vol. IA-20, no. 3, pp. 625630, 1984. [7] H. Akagi, A. Nabae, and S. Atoh, Control strategy of active power lter using multiple voltage-source PWM converters, IEEE Trans. Ind. Appl., vol. IA-22, no. 3, pp. 460465, 1986. [8] E. H. Watanabe, R. M. Stephan, and M. Aredes, New concepts of instantaneous active and reactive powers in electrical systems with generic loads, IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 8, pp. 697703, Apr. 1993.

[9] M. Aredes and E. H. Watanabe, New control algorithms for series and shunt three-phase four-wire active power lters, IEEE Trans. Power Delivery, vol. 10, pp. 16491656, July 1995. [10] G. Superti-Furga, E. Tironi, and G. Ubezio, General purpose lowvoltage power conditioning equipment, in IPEC95Int. Power Elec. Conf., Yokohama, Japan, Apr. 1995, pp. 400405. [11] M. Aredes, J. H afner, and K. Heumann, A three-phase four-wire shunt active lter using six IGBTs, in EPE95Eur. Conf. Power Elec. Appl., Sevilla, Spain, Sept. 1995, vol. 1, pp. 1.8741.879.

Maur cio Aredes was born in Sao Paulo State, Brazil, on August 14, 1961. He received the B.Sc. degree from Fluminense Federal University, Rio de Janeiro State in 1984, the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from Federal University of Rio de Janeiro in 1991, and the Dr.-Ing. degree (honors) from Technische Universit at Berlin in 1996. From 1985 to 1988, he worked as a Commissioning and Project Engineer at the Itaipu HVDC Transmission System, and from 1988 to 1991 he worked as Management Engineer in the Itaipu Power Plant SCADA Project. At present, he is working within CEPELCentro de Pesquisas de Energia El etrica, Rio de Janeiro, and his main research area includes HVDC systems, active power lters, and FACTS technology.

Jurgen H afner was born in Grobottwar, Germany, on August 7, 1964. He received the diploma degree in electrical engineering in 1991 from the Technical University, Berlin. Currently, he is working as an Assistant at the Technical University, Berlin. His research area includes active power lters, control, and simulation.

Klemens R. Heumann was born in L unen, Germany, on May 15, 1931. He received the Dipl.-Ing. degree from Rheinisch-Westf alische Technische Hochschule, Aachen, Germany, in 1956, and the Dr.-Ing. degree from Technische Universit at Berlin, in 1961. He was a Research Engineer from 1956 to 1968 and a General Manager from 1969 to 1978 in the AEG Research Institute, Berlin. He became a Professor of Power Electronics at the Universit at Hannover in 1978, and in 1983 he joined the Technische Universit at Berlin, where he is presently a Professor. He has worked as a Consultant in various industries and is the author of four books and author and co-author of more than 100 papers. Dr. Heumann is the recipient of the 1985 IEEE Power Electronics Society William E. Newell Award.