A study of three-phase active power filters under nonideal mains voltages

The performance of three-phase active power filters under nonideal voltage scenarios is investigated in this paper. It begins with the analysis of an instantaneous reactive power algorithm applied for the three-phase active power filter design, which was found to present poor performance under nonideal test scenarios. This motivates our proposed design of a new active power filter for solving such problems. In the proposed scheme, the circuit not only shows its effectiveness in the tests, but also implements with a simpler control circuit when compared with the other algorithm. The method has been implemented as a prototype and tested through various simulation cases, including ideal mains voltage, unbalanced three-phase mains voltage, and distorted mains voltage. Test results have demonstrated the feasibility and practicality of the proposed method approach for the applications. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science S.A. All rights reserved.