16th International Power Electronics and Motion Control Conference and Exposition
Cascade PI Controller for Single-phase STATCOM
Hossein Hafezi
Department of Energy, Electrical Engineering Division
Politecnico Di Milano University
Milano, Italy
hossein.hafezi@polimi.it
Abstract— This paper presents state space model of single-
phase STATCOM based on continues switching function.
Continues switching functions for bipolar voltage source inverter
(VSI) have been used to derive the transfer function for complete
controller. Two proportional integral (PI) controllers which are a
DC PI for DC link voltage control and an AC PI for alternating
current control are implemented in cascade topology in reactive
power compensation. Proposed control method has been
analyzed in simulation by using MATLAB. Root locus technique
is used to design AC PI controller parameters.
Keywords—Single-phase STATCOM, state space model, AC PI.
I. INTRODUCTION
Reactive power and harmonic compensation is an important
issue from early days of electrical and power engineering while
it has a strong impact on power loss, voltage stability and
active power flow. Shunt reactors, capacitor banks and passive
harmonic filters in transmission lines as well as distribution and
industry were traditional solution to these problems [1].
However, performance of these passive elements is highly
affected from the grid impedance and load variations. These
passive elements may cause resonance in system or fail to
respond properly in many rapidly changing dynamic loads.
Active Power Filters (APF), Static Synchronous Compensator
(STATCOM) and other Flexible AC Transmission System
(FACTS) devices show fast response and meritorious
performance for reactive power and harmonic compensations
[2]-[4]. Varieties of control methods exist in power electronics
system and their effectiveness and ability to compensate
reactive power and mitigate harmonics have been proven and
put into the practice. An experimental comparison for three
different control methods has been practiced in [5]. Dynamic
behavior and interaction of APFs are studied in detail in [6].
Analysis of STATCOM for balanced three phase loads has
been made in [7, 8]. Although wide range effective control
methods have been implemented, some of those do not fulfill
IEEE Standard 1459-2010 requirements under distorted source
voltage waveform and highly distorted load currents [9], [10].
DC link control plays an important role in STATCOM and
the other ac to dc power converters. A cascade PI controller is
used in [11-13] for multi-level shunt active power filter. The
conventional dc PI controller can get zero steady state error, if
the reference and actual values input to the controller are dc
components. This control is well understood and designed for
dc link control. Also, it is successfully implemented on ac
‹,(((
PEMC 2014
Antalya, Turkey 21-24 Sept 2014
Eyup Akpinar Abdul Balikci
Department of Electrical and Electronics Engineering
Dokuz Eylul University
Izmir, Turkey
eyup.akpinar@deu.edu.tr abdul.balikci@deu.edu.tr
motor controls if the variables are transformed from stationary
to synchronously rotating reference frame.
If the variables are at stationary reference frame like a input
current of ac to dc converter or inverter output current, the
application issues of ac PI controller are not well investigated
in power electronics applications. The hysteresis current
controller and space vector control are most common
techniques for ac variables at stationary reference frame. The
hysteresis controller is robust but keeping actual current in
constant hysteresis band is depending on the loading conditions
and switching speed of devices. The space vector control is
most successful method but it needs advanced programming
and dedicated microcontrollers.
The proposed control method is previously used for single
phase inverter control [14]. Here, the ac PI controller with
sinusoidal pulse width modulation (SPWM) technique is
implemented to control grid connected ac to dc converter. The
dc link voltage is controlled by the dc PI controller. The
converter ac input current is controlled by the ac PI controller.
This technique works with zero steady state error between the
actual and reference values. Also it is applicable by using
digital controllers [14] with simpler programming flowchart.
Remaining part of paper is organized as follows: dedicated
state space model of single-phase STATCOM is presented in
section two. Section three has the proposed cascade PI control
block diagram. The results and conclusions are given in section
four and five, respectively.
II. STATE SPACE MODEL OF STATCOM
Electrical circuit of a single-phase STATCOM based on
voltage source inverter (VSI) topology is shown in Fig. 1.
Inverter ac line current, ac side voltage and DC link voltage are
considered as state variables X1, X3 and X2, respectively. KVL
in main loop leads to
dx1 (t )
L  Rx1 (t )  v s (t )  S1 x 2 (t )  S 2 x 2 (t ) 0
dt (1)
by KCL, capacitor DC side current is related to ac side line
current as follows,
C
dx 2 ( t )
S 1 x1 ( t )  S 2 x1 ( t )
dt (2)
Also, ac side pole voltage and DC side capacitor voltage are
related to each other as given in (3).
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x 3 (t ) S1 x 2 (t )  S 2 x 2 (t ) A. Reactive Power Control

(3)
Based on SPWM technique, the difference between
The state space model of single phase VSI based reference current and converter current is fed to an AC PI
STATCOM is obtained in (4) by using (1), (2) and (3). controller. The PI output is compared with a triangular (carrier)
Switching functions (S1 and S2) in this model are either 0 or 1 waveform to generate the gate signals of solid state devices
[15, 16]. used in converter. The load is assumed to be linear load hence
only the fundamental component exists. The reference and
dx 1 R 1 2S 2 1 actual currents are AC currents therefore their phase and
 x1  x 2  x2  vs
dt L L L L (4) magnitude can be tracked by an AC PI controller [14, 18]
dx 2 1  2 S 2 designed at fundamental frequency. The block diagram given
x1
dt C in Fig. 3 has illustrated the application here.
x 3 (1  2 S 2 ) x 2
y x1

Fig. 2. SPWM generated gate signals

Fig. 1. Shunt scheme circuit of single-phase STATCOM

In control logic of a bipolar voltage source converter, a

triangular waveform is compared with the sinusoidal control
voltage. The carrier frequency of triangular wave is much
greater than the frequency of the control signal. The
diagonally opposite switches ( T1  T 3 ) or ( T 2  T 4 ) are Fig. 3. SPWM current controller block diagram
controlled simultaneously. van and vbn are either zero or dc
The error signal is fed to AC PI controller and the output
link voltage. The variations of voltages with unity magnitude will be processed as the switching functions (reference voltage)
( S1 and S 2 ) are shown in Fig. 2. The ac input voltage of the for PWM inverter. The transfer function of AC PI controller is
converter can be obtained from the following equation: given by [14], [18] as follows:
ki s
vab van  vbn (5) H AC ( s) kp  (10)
s Z2
2

The average values of S1 and S 2 can be expressed by the ki and kp are proportional gain and integration gain of AC PI
sinusoidal waveforms below [17]: controller respectively. Laplace transform of reference voltage
can be calculated from
1 1
Sˆ1  A sin(Zt  G ) 
2 2 (6) Vˆc* ( s ) ' ic ( s ) u H AC (s) (11)

1 1 Proportional and integral gains affect both magnitude and

Sˆ 2  A sin(Zt  G ) 
2 2 (7) phase displacement of control voltage. The control voltage can
be obtained with a sine wave as it is given in (12), if AC PI
Also, the complementary property of Ŝ1 and Ŝ 2 necessitate that parameters are designed properly.
vˆc* Vc sin(Zt  G )
Sˆ1  Sˆ2 1 (12)
(8)
Here, it should be noted that the supply voltage is assumed Where Vc is defined as magnitude and į is the phase shift of
to be pure sinusoidal wave given below: control voltage. It has been obviously shown that by properly
controlling the magnitude and phase angle of control voltage in
vs Vm sin(wt )
(9) (12), the reactive power and active power flow of through the
converter can be effectively controlled.

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Fig. 4. Cascade PI controller block diagram

The multiplication unit in Fig.5 is replaced by a summation

III. CASCADE PI CONTROLLER blocks as it is shown in Fig. 6 by assuming that Vdc(t) is equal
Analysis has clearly shown that the dc link voltage control to Vdc* at the steady-state operation of the system [19].
via dc PI controller and AC current control via AC PI
controller are two negative feedbacks in the system. The
controller’s parameters are important for successful tracking f d (t ) 2S 2  1
both references of these feedbacks.
The power converter of the STATCOM is a boost-type
converter; this means that the dc voltage must be kept higher
than the peak value of the ac source voltage. Also dc link
voltage value and its variation affect the control voltage
magnitude Vc and its phase displacement, į. Based on
operational principle of STATCOM and reactive power
compensation, voltage source converter does not generate real Fig.5. Inner loop block diagram
power in the case of reactive power compensation, however, it
can absorbs some amount of real power that is needed to
balance the converter losses.
The reference value of compensation current is compared
with actual converter current and the error is fed to AC PI
controller (current controller). The AC PI controller forces
actual converter current to follow the reference. Reference
voltage in mathematical model (4) is used as switching
function. The reference voltage is instantaneously compared
with triangular waveform in the simulation program prepared Fig.6. Conversion of multiplication block (a) to summation (b).
in Matlab/Simulink in order to generate gate pulse signals. The
AC PI is used with state space model in (4) and the complete Here, the block diagram is modified after these
block diagram is obtained as it is shown in Fig. 4. linearization and it is given in Fig.7.The system parameters
There are two multiplication blocks in outer loop. One of used here are given in TABLE I. Vs-Vdc term can be interpreted
them is the multiplication of switching functions with filter as disturbance in inner loop.
current (X1) yields a nonlinearity. The output of this
multiplication is the input of integrator created by the dc link
capacitor. Hence, the result specifies the dc link voltage that is
the actual value of negative feedback for dc link voltage. The
other multiplication is performed by using the output of DC PI
controller and AC supply voltage. This gives active current for
converter loss. This active current is subtracted from load
current in order to get reference for compensation current.
Inner loop covers this reference current and the rest of the
process ending with compensation current. The complete inner Fig. 7. Linearized inner loop with AC PI
loop is given in Fig. 5.

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TABLE I. SYSTEM PARAMETERS

AC Supply Voltage 30V(RMS)

Fundamental Freq. 50 HZ

Reference DC Bus 50 V

Resistive Load 80 Watt

Inductive Load 80 VAR

Coupling Inductance 5 mH

Coupling Resistance 0.5 Ohm

Sampling Time 50 —s

Switching Freq. 2.5 kHz

In order to have zero steady state error, the zeroes should be Fig. 8. Root-Locus of transfer function
very close to imaginary axes to cancel out poles affect. For this
purpose ki to kp ratio can be considered as Bode diagram of open loop transfer function is shown in
ki Fig. 9, AC PI controller has the effect on the bode diagram at
¢¢ 1 0 . 01 Ÿ k p 100 k i the resonant frequency and the gain goes to very high values at
kp
(13) the resonant frequency , therefore the system can reach at zero
Therefore, the open loop transfer function becomes steady state error at fundamental frequency. The bode diagram
of close loop transfer function in Fig. 10 shows that the gain
(100 k i s 2  k i s  98696 k i ) u 20000 becomes very high at fundamental frequency. Fig 9 and Fig 10
( s 2  98696 )( s  100 ) (14) show the phase margin of open loop and close loop systems.

Let us define
k 20000ki
Then the characteristic equation of system can be written as
follows:
100 s 2  s  98696
1 k
( s 2  98696 )( s  100 ) (15)
The poles and zeroes of this system are
p1 100 , p 2 ,3 r jZ

z1, 2  0.005 r jZ
Fig. 9. Bode diagram of open loop transfer function
The dominant pole is at p1=-100 and the effect of poles at
imaginary axes is canceled by zeroes which are located very
close to poles on imaginary axes. The root locus drawing is
shown in Fig. 8.
The value of k is found from magnitude of (16) and
consequently ki and kp values are estimated. For simplicity, the
zeroes are considered on imaginary axes.
k (S 2  Z 2 )
1
( S 2  Z 2 )( S  10 )
(16)
k s  10 (17)

If s is considered far away from dominant pole, say

s=210, then k=200 and consequently proportional and integral
gains of controller will be as follows:
Fig. 10. Bode diagram of close loop transfer function, k=200
ki=0.01 and kp=1

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injects inductive current to the network in order to compensate

capacitive reactive current of load.

Fig. 11. Block Diagram of AC PI Controller

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

The control method given in Fig. 4 is simulated in
MATLAB/Simulink environment. The supply voltage is
considered as pure sinusoidal waveform. A linear load
connected to supply voltage is resistive-inductive (R-L) load
drawing current at 0.707 lagging power factor. Ideal IGBTs
with antiparallel diode are used in H-bridge converter in
simulation model.
The dc link capacitor is selected at the value of 9400 PF .
The DC link PI voltage controller has been used with the
parameters of ki =80 and kp = 2. The AC PI controller block
diagram implemented in simulation is given in Fig 11.
Simulation results show that proposed control method can
adequately identify reactive power demand of load. The
Fig. 12. Inductive load, (a) DC link voltage, (b) source current vs source
constant DC link voltage can be assured by selecting a proper voltage, (c) compensation current vs source voltage
value for capacitor. DC link voltage, source voltage versus
source current and source voltage versus the filter current are
shown in Fig. 12.
Simulation has been made under no-load until t=0.2s. After
then the load has been connected to the ac supply. Before
connecting load to the system, the converter draws some
amount of current to keep DC link voltage stable. Fig. 12 (a)
shows the response of control system to stabilize dc link
voltage under loading. The connection of load to supply is
detected by the control system and two PI controllers (dc and
AC) keeps the system stable as the reactive power
compensation is being carried out. It takes almost two periods
of (40 msec) to boost the DC link voltage to the reference (50
volt). The DC link voltage has oscillation around 1V after
loading. Fig 12(b) shows that source current is in phase with
source voltage and reactive power compensation is achieved.
Fig. 12 (c) explicitly depicts that the current supplied by the
converter is 90º leading the source voltage (capacitive current)
in order to compensate the reactive power. Fast response (half
cycle) to the load change can be achieved and simple structure
of the controller can be easily implemented in digital
application.
The system with the same parameters shown in TABLE I is
simulated for capacitive load at 0.707 power factor. The results
are presented in Fig 13. Simulation has been made under no-
load until t=0.2s. Then the load has been connected to the ac Fig. 13. Capacitive load, (a) DC link voltage, (b) source current vs source
supply. Fig. 13(a) shows that DC link response which is almost voltage, (c) compensation current vs source voltage
the same with inductive load. Source voltage and source
current in Fig. 13(b) verify the effectiveness of control method The response of cascade controller is also examined for
to compensate capacitive load. Fig. 13(c) shows that converter resistive load. Results of simulation are given Fig 14. Load is
connected to the source again after t=0.2. Since the converter

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16th International Power Electronics and Motion Control Conference and Exposition
does not produce any reactive power there is no fluctuation on
DC link voltage as it is seen from Fig 14(a). Fig 14 (c) shows
that the converter current is almost zero. The converter draws a
very small amount of current from supply in order to keep DC
link voltage constant.
Fig. 14. Resistive load, (a) DC link voltage, (b) source current vs source
voltage, (c) compensation current vs source voltage
V. CONCLUSION
Model of single-phase STATCOM has been obtained in
state space form and combined with switching function of solid
state devices. AC PI for converter current control is used in
cascade structure with DC PI controller of DC link voltage. AC
PI parameters are estimated by considering root locus drawing.
The entire system has been analyzed in MATLAB/Simulink. It
has been observed that the reactive power compensation can be
successfully controlled by this simple cascade structure. It has
been observed that AC PI controller tracks the magnitude and
phase of reference current adequately. The entire model can
also be linearized for stability analysis as it has been done here
for inner current control loop.
Acknowledgements
This work has been carried out as a part of project
sponsored by Turkish Scientific and Research Council
(TUBøTAK) under contract 110E205.
PEMC 2014
Antalya, Turkey 21-24 Sept 2014
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