Reduced-Capacitance Thin-Film H-Bridge Multilevel STATCOM Control Utilizing an Analytic Filtering Scheme

Abstract

In this paper, an analytic capacitor voltage filtering scheme for a cascaded H-bridge (CHB) multilevel converter-based static synchronous compensator (STATCOM) is proposed. The scheme is able to filter out a low-frequency ripple of any magnitude and introduces a negligible delay to the control system. Therefore, it facilitates using high-reliability film capacitors with low capacitance instead of the conventional electrolytic capacitors. The proposed analytic filtering scheme is implemented and verified on a single-phase seven-level CHB multilevel converter-based STATCOM. The parameters' sensitivity evaluation is provided to demonstrate practicability of the proposed scheme. Simulation and experimental results are provided to compare the performance of the proposed filtering scheme with the performance of the most commonly used second-order filter-based approach to demonstrate its effectiveness.