Performance of Shunt Active Power Filter Based on Instantaneous Reactive Power Control Theory for Single-Phase System

Abstract

Recently more aware people had more concern on the quality of power supply. One of the reasons is due to the increasing demand of nonlinear loads. One of the major power quality (PQ) problems that causing malfunction of sensitive electronic equipment is harmonics. The Instantaneous Reactive Power (IRP) theory is the method that is used to calculate the harmonic compensation current for three-phase system. This technique is commonly used in the shunt active power filter (APF) for reducing the harmonics and providing a good harmonic compensation for unbalanced and nonlinear load conditions. This control theory will treat the three-phase system as three single-phase system thus it is also can implement in the single-phase system. To implement IRP theory for single-phase system can be done by using two methods, which are Clarke’s transformation method and Phase-shift method. For Clarke’s transformation method, the single-phase system need to transform into three-phase system. However, for Phase-shift method only need to shift the single-phase signal 90o, to perform the active and reactive power calculation. Therefore, the Phase-shift method is much more simplified. The aim of this paper is to discuss the performance shunt APF based on IRP theory for single-phase power system based on Clarke’s transformation method and phase-shift method to compensate current harmonics generated by nonlinear loads. Three types of nonlinear loads with different power ratings and harmonics characteristic are tested in MATLAB/Simulink to show the effectiveness of the tested control methods. As the results, show that Clarke’s transformation method given better harmonics compensate ability compared to Phase-shift method.