A dynamic tuning method for distributed active filter systems

The dramatic growth of power electronics applications has led to serious harmonic pollutions in the power system. The phenomenon of harmonic resonance resulting in severe voltage distortion has been reported. Various suppression techniques have been proposed to resolve this problem. The distributed active-filter system (DAFS) is a more effective solution by deploying multiple shunt active filter units (AFUs) in the system to cooperatively damp the harmonic resonance. This paper proposes a dynamic tuning scheme for the DAFS to enhance its filtering performance. Based on the measured voltage harmonic distortion at the installation point, each AFU can dynamically adjust its own filtering volt-ampere (VA) capacity to maintain the total harmonic distortion of the line voltage at an allowable level. The proposed strategy can be integrated with the droop control between the conductance command and VA consumption so that the harmonic-filtering workload is evenly shared among various AFUs. The operation principles and dynamic analyses are presented in this paper, and test results based on simulations and experiments validate the proposed approach. Index Terms--Active filters, distributed active-filter systems (DAFSs), harmonic damping, harmonic resonance.