A DSP Based Active Power Filter for Induction Heating

Systems
Amaan Riza
Engineering Design and Mathematics, University of the West of England
Bristol, BS16 1QY, United Kingdom
ahamed2.riza@live.uwe.ac.uk

Abstract This paper presents an application where digital signal

processing techniques are used for the purpose of filtering undesired
harmonic currents which are injected in induction heating systems.
The reasons as to why DSP techniques are appropriate for this
application is explained in this paper (without delving into the
intricate solution details). Compared to the previous methods, this
method is more flexible and cheaper and also provides power factor
correction to the system.
Keywords Digital Signal Processors; Active Filter; Analogue Filter;
Harmonic Distortion; Induction Heater

I. INTRODUCTION
Induction heating is used in the process of bonding, hardening or
melting metals or any other conductive materials through
electromagnetic induction. However, the non-linear characteristics
of these induction heating systems inject harmonics and result in
lower power-factor and efficiency of the power system.
Harmonics in these systems can lead to many unwanted side
effects, some of these are mentioned below:
Overheating of transformers
Low power factor
Interference with precision instruments and communication
equipment
Malfunction of protection equipment
Voltage distortion within facilities
Overloaded neutral conductors and high levels of neutral to
ground voltage
It can be understood that the elimination of these harmonics is of
utmost importance to the end user.

Active filters is a much better alternative method to eliminate

system harmonics owing to the fact that all harmonics can be
compensated by one piece of equipment which effectively injects
compensating currents into the AC lines. These filters are more
flexible, cheaper and are highly controllable as opposed to passive
filters.
Active filters can also be designed using digital signal
processors, this would make the filter much more effective and
gives much more controllability to the end user and provides better
harmonic compensation. A proposed DSP based solution is briefly
described in the next section.
III. DSP BASED ACTIVE POWER FILTERS
A Proposed Solution
Fig 1 below shows the block diagram of an active power filter
connected in shunt in a single phase system.

II. ELIMINATION OF HARMONICS

A. Using Passive Filters
Conventionally, passive filters were the choice for the
elimination of harmonics and to improve power-factor. Although
these can be very easily implemented there are many disadvantages
that these bring to the system, some of these are mentioned below;
Separate filter required for every major harmonic
Large size
Expensive
Resonance
Fig. 1 Block diagram of the proposed active power filter (APF).

B. Active Filters

The induction heater is placed as the non-linear load in this

system, a non-linear load current il(t) is supplied to the single-phase
diode bridge rectifier circuit, which consists of the induction heater.
The filter is comprised of an H bridge inverter, a capacitor and an
inductor, and the inverter switches are controlled by the DSP,
which produces the compensating current ic(t).
The following figure shows the block diagram representation of
how the control signals are calculated for this system.

IV. CONCLUSIONS
In this paper a single phase active power filter which is
controlled by a digital signal processor is presented.
After giving an overview of the problem faced when using
induction heating systems, this paper discusses the various
techniques that were used in order to overcome the issue of
undesired harmonics.
It can be clearly seen that the solution that uses DSP techniques
are the most appropriate as it provides both harmonic elimination
and power factor correction by requiring less feedback
information and is much cheaper than all other methods .

Fixed-point DSP chips can be used to implement this filter, the

C2000 family from Texas Instruments is an ideal choice.
REFERENCES
[1]
[2]

Fig. 2 Block diagram of the DSP based control scheme

As it can be seen clearly in this proposed method only very little

feedback information is needed in order to compute the
compensating current and the gating signals.
B Advantages and Disadvantages
With the usage of DSP techniques, we can obtain a much
simpler and cheaper solution compared to the other existing
solutions. One of the greatest advantage of this proposed scheme is
that it only needs one current sensor used to sense the nonlinear
input current and two voltage sensors to sense the input supply
voltage and the dc bus voltage. The proposed technique
also provides reactive power compensation or power
factor correction.
One of the drawbacks that this system has is that
it, appropriate scaling factors needs to be developed
in order to eliminate the effects of truncation or
overflow which can lead to wrong calculation of the
compensating current and the gate signals.

W. Shireen, A DSP-based active power filter for low voltage distribution

systems, 1st ed. Houston, TX, 2008.
Wikipedia,
'Induction
heating',
2015.
[Online].
Available:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induction_heating. [Accessed: 08- May- 2015].