An efficient reference compensation current strategy of three-phase shunt active power filter implemented with processor-in-the-loop simulation

SUMMARY This paper proposes an efficient method to obtain the equivalent fundamental positive-sequence voltage for determining the shunt active power filter (APF) reference compensation currents, where the source voltage magnitude and phase angle at the fundamental frequency are detected by a simplified adaptive linear combiner neural network. The APF reference current calculator is developed and is realized on the DSP board through processor-in-the-loop (PIL) simulation for validating the effectiveness of the proposed APF control strategy, where the source voltages and the load currents are both distorted and unbalanced. In addition, results obtained based on the true positive-sequence fundamental source current after APF compensation and another classic approach are included for comparison. It is shown that results obtained by the PIL simulations with the proposed and compared methods agree very well. The proposed APF reference compensation current strategy is simple and practical, which provides a cost-effective and computationally efficient manner for the APF controller implementation with PIL simulations. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.