A Three-phase Four-wire Three-level Active Power

Filter Based on One-cycle Control

Jian Hu,Zhaohui Sun,Ajmal Farooq and Guozhu Chen

College of Electrical Engineering
Zhejiang University
Hangzhou, China, 310027
Email: gzchen@zju.edu.cn

Abstract—In this paper, an active power filter (APF) based

S1 S5 S9
on a modified one-cycle control is proposed. This control method
can be applied in a three-level three-phase four-wire system. By
Nonlinear Load C1
adding an additional current sensor to detect the fundamental S2 S6 D3 S10 D5
component of the output current, the proposed APF is capable of D1

compensating harmonic components independently from the VAR A

compensation so that the capacity of APF can be greatly reduced.
The viability of the proposed scheme is verified by performing B
experimental validation.
C
Keywords—Active power filter, one-cycle control (OCC), three-
level, reactive power control S3 S7 D4 S11 D6
D2
C2

I. I NTRODUCTION S4 S8 S12

With the development of power electronics, the number

of nonlinear loads connected to grid such as motor drivers,
power inverter, thyristor converters has increased significantly.
These nonlinear loads generate harmonic current which results
in low power factor and voltage disturbances. Moreover, these
harmonics greatly increase the power loss and could cause
dangerous resonant in the power system. So many techniques
are used to eliminate the harmonics of the system such
as Power-factor-correction (PFC) techniques, passive power
filters, and active power filters (APFs). The PFC technique
is often used in low power rating circumstances. Compared to
the passive filters, the APFs have smaller volume and better
performance and are used more widely in power system [1],
[2].
Three-level converter has many advantages over traditional
converter for its higher efficiency, lower filter inductance and
lower voltage stress on power devices. So three-level structure
gains increasing popularity in high power rating systems. [3],
[4]
One-cycle control gains popularity for its robustness and
no need for voltage sensor. So many works have been done for
its applications in APFs [5], [6]. Reference [7] only considered
the application of one-cycle control in three-wire three-phase
three-level system and lacked of the consideration of neutral
point unbalance of three-level converter which is a critical
problem under unbalanced load.
Additionally, existing one-cycle scheme is incapable of
distinguishing the reactive current and harmonics current
generated by the non-linear load. So the power rating of
APFs must be designed to compensate both the harmonic and
reactive current of the system. As the APFs need high current
Fig. 1. Configuration of main circuit of proposed APF
bandwidth to output the harmonic current for compensating the
nonlinear load, the semiconductor devices have to work at very
high switching frequencies to operate properly. Large rating
of the APFs greatly increases the cost of it. This disadvantage
limits the use of OCC-scheme in APFs [8].
This paper proposes a three-phase four-wire three-level
APF based on one-cycle control. Proposed scheme uses an
additional voltage loop to balance the natural point voltage
of the three-level converter. A set of current sensors is used
to detect the APF output current so that the proposed APF
are capable of compensating harmonic only. This paper is
organized as follows. Section II describes the control config-
uration of the three-phase four-wire three-level APFs. Section
III describes working principals of active power filter which
only compensates the harmonic of the system. Section IV
verifies the proposed scheme with a set of experiments done
on a laboratory prototype. Section V presents the conclusion
of this paper.
II. O NE - CYCLE CONTROL OF THREE - PHASE FOUR - WIRE
THREE - LEVEL APF
The configuration and model of the system are given in
Fig.1 and Fig.2.
Assuming the two DC-link voltage of three-level inverter
are balanced. The output voltages of the inverter vxo are

k,((( 
 ila ilb ilc as the output of the voltage loop.
va isa ifa L vao
- + + -
Theoretically, there are infinite sets of dx1 and dx2 which
can realize (5). In order to minimize the switching loss, one
vb isb ifb vbo of the duty ratios is set to zero and the other one is controlled
- + - to satisfy (5):
⎧
vc isc ifc vco ⎨ isx (isx > 0)
- + + - dx1 = Vm
⎩
0 (isx < 0)
⎧ (x = a, b, c) (7)
⎨ 0 (isx > 0)
Fig. 2. Model of APF
dx2 = i
⎩ − sx (isx < 0)
Vm
derived by averaging the voltage over one switching frequency:
⎧ (7) can be satisfied by two integrator and comparers easily.
⎨ vao = (da1 − da2 )Udc
vbo = (db1 − db2 )Udc (1) In order to balance the natural point voltage, an additional
⎩ neutral current should be injected into the system. So the isx
vco = (db1 − db2 )Udc
is added with the output of the voltage i0 which controls the
where dx1 and dx2 represent the duty ratios of the high output neutral point.
and low output of the the inverter; Udc represents the average
of two DC-link voltages. So the control diagram of one phase of the three-phase
four-wire three-level APF can be depicted in Fig.3.
As the filter works at a very high frequency and parameters
of the filter are small, the voltage drop across the filter vLa , III. R EACTIVE CURRENT CONTROL METHOD OF APF S
vLb , vLc can be neglected. Therefore, (2) can be derived.
⎧ As introduced in Section II, the control goal of one-cycle
⎨ va ≈ vao control is shown in 8.
vb ≈ vbo (2)
⎩ vsx = isx Re (x = a, b, c) (8)
vc ≈ vco

The control goal of the active power filter is to force line Therefore, one-cycle control lacks of the ability to distin-
current to follow the phase voltage with the same shape and guish the reactive current and harmonic current generated by
phase. So the impedance looking into the whole system should the load and it only compensates them together. So the output
be resistive. And the control goal is to realize the following current of APF if and the load current il both can be separated
relationship: into three parts
⎧ If = Ifa + Ifr + Ifh ;
⎨ va = isa Re (9)
vb = isb Re (3) Il = Ila + Ilr + Ilh ; (10)
⎩
vc = isc Re
where Ifa and Ila represent the active components; Ifr and Ilr
where Re represents the load of the whole system. represent the reactive components; Ifh and Ilh represent the
Combining (1) ,(2) and (3) yields harmonic components.
⎧ It is obvious that the reactive current and harmonic compo-
⎨ isa Re ≈ (da1 − da2 )Udc
nents of the If and Il compensate each other and left Is only
isb Re ≈ (db1 − db2 )Udc (4)
⎩ consist of the active components. Ignoring the harmonics and
isc Re ≈ (dc1 − dc2 )Udc considering only the fundamental, the phase diagram of the
steady state of existing one-cycle controlled APF is shown in
Reshaping the equation (4) yields Fig.4a.
⎧
⎪
⎪ isa ≈ (da1 − da2 )
Udc To eliminate the reactive current generated by APF, one
⎪
⎪
⎪
⎪ Re way is to change the input current of one-cycle control. New
⎨ Udc 

isb ≈ (db1 − db2 ) (5) input current Is is made by subtracting Ilr from Is :
⎪
⎪ Re
⎪
⎪

Is = Is − Ilr (11)
⎪
⎪ U
⎩ isc ≈ (dc1 − dc2 ) dc 
Re If the Is is controlled by the one-cycle control, it would follow
the phase voltage and contain only active current:
Comparing to the duty ratios dx1 and dx2 , the DC-link 
voltage Udc changes slower and can be controlled by the Is = Ifa + Ila (12)
voltage loop. So define:
From the main circuit of the system, it is obvious that
Udc
Vm = (6) I s = If + I l (13)
Re


 Udc2 Uref S1
Reset S
SET
Q
signal
+
Udc1 +
+
-
+
Vm R CLR Q
S2
PI ĥ -
Tri-level
S
SET
Q logic S3
+
ĥ +
Udc2 - R CLR Q
- S4
Udc1 +
-
i0 + + is
PI

Fig. 3. Control diagram of three-level APF based on one-cycle control

If q

Is Vs If Vs
iq

Il
(a) Without reactive current control
If § 0 Is ÿ Vs
Ilr
Il Ĭ Is
(b) With reactive current control
Fig. 4. Phase Vector of the APF
Combining (10),(11),(12) and (13) then yields
If = Ifa − Ilh
The reactive component of the if is eliminated. The phase
diagram of the OCC based APF changes as shown in Fig.4b.
Fig.4b indicates that the reactive current generated by the APF
 iq = 0
reduces to zero while the is still satisfies the equation (8).
As the magnitude of the Ila is unknown, Ila could not
be distinguished from il without voltage sensors to detect
the phase information of the grid. However, the Ifa is quiet
small for APF only consumes little active power, So instead
of sensing il , the output current of APF if is sensed to measure
the reactive current of the load.
The goal of the proposed control is to achieve little
fundamental component of output current of APF. Similar to
d
id Is
Fig. 5. Voltage and current vectors of proposed park transformation
instantaneous active and reactive current component method
in [9], park transformation is used to extract the fundamental
components. A phase lock loop (PLL) is used to lock the
line current isa to get the frequency information of the grid.
Then the output currents of APF: ifa , ifb and ifc are sent
into park transformation to get d-axis current id and q-axis
current iq . id and iq pass through a low-pass filter to get the
DC components id and iq which represent the fundamental
components of ifa , ifb and ifc . It is important to notice that
under this circumstances currents id and iq do not represent
the Ifa and Ifr . The reason of it is that phase information gotten
by PLL is from line current is instead of the voltage of grid
(14) vs , so that the d-axis is in the same direction of the Is as Fig.5
shows. The control goal of the system is:

id = 0
(15)
so PI controllers are used to control iq and iq to eliminate
the static error. The reference of id and iq is zero in this
case so that the comparison stage is ignored in the diagram.
It is impossible to eliminate all the fundamental components
of the if for existence of ifa , so dead-zone stage is added
between the low-pass filter and PI controller enabling active
power to be sent into the APF. The outputs of PI controller
are passed though an inverse park transformer to get the ilr .
These currents are combined with line current isa , isb and isc


 isa
PLL isa isb isc

id id iar +
+
isa'
ifa /3) 3,
ifb ibr +
+
isb' One-cycle T1-12
abc/dq iq iq dq/abc icr
ifc /3) 3, +
+ isc' Controller

Fig. 6. Diagram of reactive current control

(20A/div) (50A/div) (50A/div)(100V/div)

Us
La D1 D3 D5

Is
RL

If Il

D2 D4 D6

Time (5ms/div)

Fig. 7. Non-linear Load

Fig. 8. Experimental waveforms of proposed one-cycle control
TABLE I. PARAMETERS OF PROPOSED SYSTEM

Items Values
DC side capacitor Cdc 1350μF
(100V/div)

RMS value of phase voltage Vs 80V

Udc1

Filter inductance L 570μH

Load resistance of diode rectifier RL 5Ω
Addition inductance La 1mH
Sampling frequency fs 10kHz
Switching frequency fsw 10kHz
Dead-time td 2.5μs
Grid frequency fl 50Hz
(100V/div)

  
Udc2

to get proposed input current isa , isb and isc as shown in

Fig4b. The control block diagram of the proposed control is
depicted in Fig.6.

IV. E XPERIMENTAL R ESULTS

To validate the effectiveness of the proposed control, Time (20ms/div)
detailed experimental studies are carried out. The specification
of the system is presented in Table I.
Fig. 9. DC-link voltage of propose one-cycle control
To test the reactive control ability of the proposed control,
an additional inductance is added between the rectifier act as
reactive power source as in Fig.7. In this experiment, the Total Harmonic Distortion(THD) is
reduced from 21% (without APF) to 4.4% (with APF). The
Fig.8 illustrates the waveforms of the phase voltage vs , harmonic suppression ability of proposed APF is validated.
load current il , line current is and output current of APF if of
proposed system. Fig.9 illustrates the DC-link voltage of proposed control.



If (20A/div)
Time (10ms/div)
(a) With reactive current control
If (20A/div)
Time (10ms/div)
(b) Without reactive current control
Fig. 10. Comparison of the output current
There is no static unbalance between two DC side voltages. It
indicates that the proposed control scheme could control the
neutral point of the three-level inverter. So the voltage stress of
the switching and the power loss of the devices are minimized.
To validate the reactive current control method shown in
section III, two output currents of APF with and without
proposed control are compared. The experimental waveforms
are illustrated in Fig.10. The fundamental component of the
output current is reduced from 8.4A (without reactive current
control) to 1.4A (with reactive current control). The RMS (root
mean square ) value is reduced from 11.0A (without reactive
current control) to 6.7A (with reactive current control). The
results validate the effectiveness of the reactive current control
method presented in section III.
V. C ONCLUSION
One-cycle control scheme based active power filter has
advantages for its robustness and no voltage sensor over other
control schemes. The normal one-cycle control has no ability
to distinguish the reactive and harmonic components and can
not be applied to three-level system. These limit its use in
industry applications. In this paper, a novel one-cycle based

APF is introduced. It can be applied in three-phase four-wire
three-level APF and can compensate the harmonic only. So
this scheme is suitable in high power application and can
decrease the cost of the APFs. With the help of analytical
studies and experimental verification, the effectiveness of the
proposed control has been demonstrated.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The project is supported by National Natural Science
Foundation of China (51177147) and Zhejiang Key Science
and Technology Innovation Group Program (2010R50021).
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