Series Active Power Filters to Compensate Harmonics and Reactive Power with the Direct Compensating Voltage Extraction Method in Three-Phase Four-Wire Systems

This paper presents the analysis of series active power filter for reactive power compensation, load balancing, harmonic elimination, and neutral current eradication in three-phase four-wire power systems. Generally, the three-phase four-wire system is widely employed in distributing electric energy to several office building and manufacturing plants. In such systems, the third harmonic and its 3rd harmonics are termed as triple and zero sequence components that do not cancel each other in the system neutral. Consequently, the triple harmonics add together creating a primary source of excessive neutral current. Regarding this concern, this paper presents a new control algorithm for a series hybrid active system, whereas the control approach it adopts directly influence its compensation characteristics. Hence, the advantage of this control algorithm is the direct extraction of compensation voltage reference without phase transformations and multiplying harmonic current value by gain and the required rating of the series active filter is much smaller than that of a conventional shunt active power filter. In order to show the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm, experiments have been carried out.