An Advanced Current Control Strategy for Three-Phase Shunt Active Power Filters

This paper proposes an advanced control strategy to enhance performance of shunt active power filter (APF). The proposed control scheme requires only two current sensors at the supply side and does not need a harmonic detector. In order to make the supply currents sinusoidal, an effective harmonic compensation method is developed with the aid of a conventional proportional-integral (PI) and vector PI controllers. The absence of the harmonic detector not only simplifies the control scheme but also significantly improves the accuracy of the APF, since the control performance is no longer affected by the performance of the harmonic tracking process. Furthermore, the total cost to implement the proposed APF becomes lower, owing to the minimized current sensors and the use of a four-switch three-phase inverter. Despite the simplified hardware, the performance of the APF is improved significantly compared to the traditional control scheme, thanks to the effectiveness of the proposed compensation scheme. The proposed control scheme is theoretically analyzed, and a 1.5-kVA APF is built in the laboratory to validate the feasibility of the proposed control strategy.