E E International Conference on Advances in Power System Control, Operation and Management, November 1991,Hong Kong

A n Active Filter for Reactive a n d Harmonic Compensation Using

Voltage Source Inverter

C. E. Lin', M. T. Tsai, Y. S. Shiao and C. L. Huang

*Institude of Aeronautics and Astronautics

Institude of Electrical Engineering
National Cheng Kung University, Tainan, Taiwan, R.O.C.

Active filter has the following features that make it

an attractive alternative to other methods [1,6,7]. All
the harmonics presented in the load can be compensated.
The maximum order harmonic to be suppressed has no
theoretical limit, and is determined by the switching pattern of the active filter. If harmonic components change in
magnitude or frequency, the active filters can also operate
exactly without changing any components.
Active filters have been studied to compensate harmonics in power system in the last decade [ S l O ] . Before
that, there was nothing beyond a laboratory testing stage,
because the circuit technology was too poor to be practically implemented. Until a remarkable progress of fast
switching devices, such as power transistor and gate turnoff thyristor (GTO), has spurred the interest in the study
for harmonic compensation.
In this paper, an active filter based on the instantaneous power theory [1,2] is presented. The calculating
methods to calculate the instantaneous power are discussed. The active filter using the ramp and hysteresis current control are compared in different applications.
Because there is an inherent magnitude and phase error
in these current control mode, a phase leading compensator is proposed to improve the system performance. The
computer simulation results show the operation chararteristics of the active filter. Moreover, a laboratory experiment system with a current mode control is established to
demonstrate an active filter with excellent performance to
supply instantaneously the hamonic current and reactive
power for nonlinear loads.

A B S T R A C T An active power compensator is presented

by employing voltage-source pulsewidth modulated
(PWM) inverter to suppress ac harmonics by injecting
compensating current to the ac system. The control strategy using switching devices is proposed on the basis of the
instantaneous power theory. This is different in principle
from the conventional control strategy. It has two important features to maintain a unit power factor for input
source, as well as to reduce harmonic currents generated
by nonlinear load. Two current methods are discussed,
and their computer simulations are used to compare with
the experiment results. For ramp comparison control, a
phase-leading controller is also proposed to improve the
system response. An experimental prototype system is
constructed to verify the analysis and design.
1. Introduction
Power electronics has been widely used in many fields
in recent years. Along with such application, present
power system suffers great influence in harmonic pollution and increasing reactive'power. In utility system, it
is desirable to prevent the harmonic current which results
in EM1 and resonant problems, and to limit the reactive power flow so as to reduce the losses in transmission
or distribution line, and further to stabilize system voltage,. Tranditionally, passive LC filter, capacitor bank and
thyristor control reactor (TCR) are used to filter the harmonics and to compensate the reactive current due to
nonlinear loads. However, in practical applications these
methods have many disadvantages.
The LC filter can only filter some specific harmonic
components, but may cause resonant problem. It generates a large percentage of reactive power to power system.
A TCR is designed to supply variable reactive power
instead of the capacitor bank for k e d reactive power.
Nevertheless, in order to provide variable reactive power,
the capacitor of TCR must be complemented by an inductor. Moreover, the TCR cannot provide an instantaneous
reactive power because of their inherent time delay.
The conventional passive filter and TCR cause leading
current or lagging current by repeatedly accumulating energy to the energy storage elements and releasing it back
to the system. But, an active filter does theoretically require no energy storage element and operate the same
function as L C filter, capacitor bank or TCR. The active
filter also controls the reactive power and harmonic current with extremely fast response. It can be expected to
be an ideal device to compensate the reactive power and
harmonic current, effectively.
Based on the instantaneous power theorem [I],when
the three line voltages are balanced, the s u m of the threephase power flows into the active power compensator from
the line is zero at any instant. So that, an active filter without large LC storge element can provide instantaneously and continuously variable leading and lagging
reactive power and hamonic current for nonlinear loads
(2-61. Actually, it consists of some capacitors and some
reactors in the domain application.

2. System Configuration a n d Control Scheme

Fig. 1 shows the system configuration and control

scheme of the proposed active filter. The proposed active filter is regarded as a current source and to be adjusted and injected into the nonlinear load to compensate
the existing harmonics and reactive current. In Fig. 1,
the proposed control scheme consists of analog circuit for
harmonics and reactive current calculation, dc capacitor
voltage control, and current mode control for the voltage
source inverter. These circuits are designed on the basis
of the instantaneous power theorem.
2.1 Calculation Algorithm of Instantaneous Real and Reactive Power
The three-phase voltages

U,,

4,
U,, and load currents

i,, is, ic are in a-b-c coordinate, apart from each other by

2n/3. They are transformed into the d-q orthogonal c*
ordinate by the following expressions,

[ ::] [
=

[:I
588

1 -112
0 &I2

1 -112
0

a12

-112
-&I21
-112
-&/2]

[ ::]
[?]
ia
'C

power source

From Eq. (1) and (2), the instantaneous real power p1

and reactive power q, flowing into load are expressed by:

[ :] [ ::, I: [ :1

p . = jj,

PI

= PI

+ FI

(3)

Comparing Eqs. (1) and (2) to (3), the conventional

instantaneous real power on the three-phase coordinate is
equal to the instantaneous r e d power on the d-q orthogonal coordinate. That is,
pl

vaia

Vdid+vqiq.

vbib

Vci,

(4)

Whereas, the average reactive power associated with the

reactive current is zero over one period on the three-phase
coordinate, and the reactive power in d-q coordinate is
zero at any instant shown by the follow equation.
q1 = vd x i q

- vq

id.

IC3

PI = P1 +61,

a+

in d-q coordinate, p* and q' are the control parameters

of Table 1, pa" is the instantaneous real power which is
necessary to compensate the operation loss of inverter.
In Fig. 1, voltage and current sensors are used to
measure load voltage and load current, van,u b n , U,, i d ,
and i,l. Those singals are fed into d-q transformation
circuit to calculate the instantaneous real and reactive
power, PI, f i 1 , ql and 41. A Butterworth filter is designed to
separate those parameters for different operation purpose
as Table 1. The chosen parameters, p' and q*, are used in
an inverse calculation circuit to get the control reference
currents, iid and i;. After feeding i:,, and into invese dq transformation circuit, the three-phase control singals,
i:,, i b and i:, are obtained. A current control circuit
is used to control the ouput current of inverter, i,,, icb
and i,,, to follow the control singals, i15, iZb and i:,. If
all the circuit are described as above without time delay,
the active filter will supply harmonic and reactive current
without any diffculty to cancel the harmonics and reactive
current of the nonlinear load.

2.2 Separating circuit of

GA(s)= 1 - G'(s),

4,
I
~.

:I-'[

P'

+*' Pa"

(9)

here G'(s) is the transfer function of the BLPF.

Therefore, the control strategy of the active filter is to

chose those parameters to control the output current of
inverter to follow the instantaneous harmonics and reactive current for the nonlinear load. Eq. (7) becomes:

,: [=I:[

PI, 61, ij1 and 44

As mentioned previously, the separating circuit for p'

and q* is very important. It consists of a high pass filter to
extract j~
from p1 and 41 from q1. The proposed high pass
filter is basically Butterworth low pass filter (BLPF)[8] as
Fig. 1. The transfer function is given by:

control
parameters

ijl,

Figure 1. System configuration and control scheme of

active filter.

For different application, these parameters PI, f i t , q l

and Gl are chosen as the control parameters of active filter
shown as Table 1.

switching table

I + L

1+6 sma)(l+o 1ZSma)

where, p~ and iji are the dc components corresponding

to the fundamental real and reactive current, and 6, and
4, are the ac components corresponding to the harmonic
current in nonlinear loads.
In the proposed control scheme, an analog circuit consisting of multipliers, dividers and summing circuit is used
for d-q transformation and to calculate the instantaneous
components of real power, p1, and reactive power, ql, of
the nonlinear load.
An optimal operation condition for the system in Fig
1 achieves that the power source only supplies real power
and the active filter supplies the harmonics and reactive
power to the nonlinear load. It is the purpose for an active
filter design. In order to apply the instantaneous power
theorem to control the active filter, Eq. (3) is changed
into the following equation,

Application purpose

current mode control

phaseleadin compensator

(6)

41,

Harmonic current and

reactive power compensation

(5)

Therefore, the calculation method defined by the definition of tranditional reactive power is can not for instantaneous power calculation especially for reactive compe
nents.
Using the instantaneous power theorem to nonlinear
load, the components of fundanmental real and reactive
power and the components of harmonic real and reactive
power can be obtained at any instant. Comparing its
voltage and current, the harmonic current can be resolved
into two components, one is active current and the other
is reactive current. Therefore, p~and ql in Eq. (3) can be
decomposed into:

q1

p i v qt calculation

Thus, GA(s)is a high pass filter. Design of this the

low pass filter is most important for the control circuit
because various compensation characteristics are referring
to cutoff frequency and order of low pass filter.
In this control system, the BLPF is used as the separating circuit to extract the + f i t and the i j 1 + 41. Therefore, a 2nd-order BLPF with cutoff frequency f=30 Hz is
designed for the experiments.

(8)

where i e d and i,, are the output currents of active filter

589

the other two legs. The differential equation are expressed

as:

2.3 The Output Current Control of Active Filter

For the active filter, it is desired to control the output current of inverter even though it is a voltage source
inverter. In this application, the output current of active
filter is controlled to follow the reference current, if,, ifb
and ifc. The current mode control of PWM inverter can
adopt many control methods. The hysteresis control and
the ramp control are used.
For a hysteresis control, the output current of active
filter is controlled in a tolerance band which is around the
reference current. Under this control, the output current
of inverter follows the reference current with a small error.
Its switching frequency is not fixed that the harmonics of
output current is not well-defined.
For a ramp comparison control, the error current is
compared with a fixed frequency triangular waveform in
order to get a switching profile to regulate the output
current of inverter. With ramp comparison, the inverter
is switched at the frequency of the triangle wave, and
the output current of inverter results in Well-defined harmonics. There is an inherent magnitude and phase error
between the reference current and the output current of
inverter.
In ie important to l i t the harmonics for the active filter. Therefore, the ramp comparison control is fabricated
into bread-board testing and a phase leading compensator
is designed to improve the magnitude and the phase error
in this paper.

Eqs. (13) and (14) show that only two current elements are independent to meet

i,

+ ib + i , = 0 .

Thus the current in any phase is completely determined by controlling the current in the other two phases.
The switching conditions of each leg is shown as:

Switching states of inverter, 0 = OFF, 1 = ON, Tr2, Tr4,

Tr6 are reverse state of Trl, Tr3, Tr5 correspondingly. In
row 1 and row 8, the inverter output voltage is zero, thus,
the load is effectively allowed to coast, and the controller
seems to experience a lack of control during this time.

2.4 Analysis of two applications

Case 1: The neutral point of load is connected to the

midpoint of dc capacitor benk as Fig. 1.
In this case, the three phases of inverter are independent. One phase of the inverter voltage can be described
bY

2.5 DC voltage control

According to the instantaneous power theorey, the artive filter requires no capacitor for energy storage. Whereas, it is necessary for the active filter with a capacitor to
maintain the voltage of dc bus in order to force the line
current in the desired direction.
In the field application, a control circuit to control
the voltage of dc capacitor is proposed for compensation
the voltage drop during the operation losses of the active
filter, and to suppress the voltage fluctuation without increasing the capacitance of the de capacitor.
The presented dc control algorithm shown in Fig. 1
is adopted to regulate the average voltage of V, to the
reference value VL. The value of VL must be high enough
than the peak value of load voltage and the voltage drop
of switching devices.

where VA, and i are inverter output voltage and current,

Vanis the load voltage of line to neutral, L is the output
inductance of inverter.
The slope of the current wave can be given as:

The value of V,, with respect to switching Conditions

is shown as:

3. Simulation and Discussion

Switching states of inverter, O=OFF, l=ON. Because these

two neutral points are connected together, the inverter
can provide an instantaneous current. By hysteresis control, the inverter switching frequency will vary over a
fundamental inverter period since the current ripple is
specified by the hysteresis band. With a fixed deadband
current i d , Eq. (10) is used to calculate the resulting
frequency, which depends on the voltage Vanand has a
maximum value fm at Van= 0 :

fm=

The characteristics of operation and inherent limitation in the active filter are important in various operation
conditions, especially the behavior of current mode control in the active filter. A simulation referring to Fig. 1
with some ideal conditions is carried out.
Fig. 2 is the voltage and current waveform of the simulated load which contain harmonics and reactive compments.
The simulation results in Fig. 3(a) is the hysteresis
control for Case 1. In this case the hysteresis band specified the maximun ripple current. Fig. 3(b) shows that
the error current of Case 2 is double to the error current
of Case 1, because the sum of the reference current of
three-phase is zero in Case 2. Since the current ripple
is specified by the hysteresis band, the inverter switching
frequency will vary over a fundamental inverter period.
It is more difficault to trigger the switching devices when
switching frequency is not fixed.
With the ramp comparison control, the inverter is
switched at the frequency of the triangle wave and its
output current containing well-defined harmonics. There
is an inherent magnitude and phase error between the ac-

Ed
-.2Ll*

Case 2: The neutral point of load is not connected to

the midopoint of dc capacitor bank.
In this case, a current controller can exhibit an ambiguity when commanding the s i n g signala to an inverter.
When an inverter leg switches condition states, the resulting voltage vector is dependent on the state of the other
two inverter legs. That is, the individual line to neutral
voltages are not independent of each other, and the response of each line current will be dependent not only on
the etate of the corresponding leg but also on the state of

590

tual current and the reference signal shown in Fig. 4 Its

error can be reduced by increasing the controller gain or
applying compensator. In Fig. 1 a phase leading copensator is proposed to improve those error. Fig. 5 shows the
performance of this additional compensator in the ramp
comparison control. From the simulation result, the p r e
posed compensator works very well and the errors can be
reduced to almost zero.

From simulation results, implementation of the hysteresis control in Case 1 is the simplest amomg all casea.
The ramp comparison control has the advantage of limiting the maximum inverter switching frequency and prducing well-defined harmonics, but its controller requires
a larger gain and additional compensator to reduce the
current errors.

i,

-5

( a ) Case 1, G(s)=3
A
2.

-lot
0

0.

0.005

0.01

0.015

0.02

Figure 2. The voltage and current waveform of

simulation load.

ms

0.b2

0.b5

0.b3

( b ) Case 1, G(s)=lO.
A
5.

ms

-5
0.

ms

0.b2

e.bs

0 . h 5

0 . 25

5,

if

0.425

i,

ms

-5

ms

o.bz

i,

-5

0.

( c ) Case 2, G(s)=3.

( a ) Case 1.
5 .

0.

O.b3

0.

0. 3

( d ) Case 2, G(s)=lo.

( b ) Case 2.

Figure 4. The simulation results of ramp comparison

control.

Figure 3. The simulation results of hysteresis control.

591

i.

if

u
(a)
0 . b2

0.425

u
I

-1 2

ms

-5

0.b3

25

50

rns

Figure 6. The experimental load current.

6Ab

(a)

-51

Figure 5. ( a ) Ramp comparison control of

0
6A(

10

30

20

rns

( b ) The source voltage and current during

the nonlinear load has been compensated by
active filter.

4. Implementation and Experiment Results

The sophistication of an active filter depends on the

order, amplitude and phase of the harmonic current to be
compensated. Fig. 1 is the block diagram of the experiment system. It is emphasised that each block is constituted by analog devices in order to get good performance
with very little time dealy.
The power transistor is adopted as the Switching device of inverter under switching frequency of 4.2 K Hz fo
least switching losses. The output impedance of inverter
is 9.5 mH with 20 uF, that forms the 3-db point at 400
Hz in order to reduce the switching harmonics. The dc
bus voltage is 200 V limited by the power transistor voltage rating. A three-phase rectified lamp load is used as a
nonlinear load. This experimental load current contains
harmonics and reactive current as shown in Fig. 6.
The purpose of this experiment demonstrates the proposed control configuration and scheme. Figs. 7-9 show
the testing results of this bread-board active filter. Those
results show that this active filter is not as good as an ideal
active filter, because the tracing characteristic of inverter
output current to follow the compensation current is not
well performed. One limitation of this bread-board active
filter is the switching frequency, because the harmonic
frequency higher than the switching frequency can not be
synthesized by the active filter. The other limitation is
the tum-on/ turn-off characteristics of power transistor.
Fig. 8 shows the source voltage and current after the
experiment load being compensated by this bread-boad
active filter. Fig. 9 shows the harmonics spectrum of
the source current. It points out that the source current
is in-phase with the source voltage. The main harmonic
in lower order is reduced. If the switching frequence increases to reach the hightest order of hamonia and high
speed switching device is used, the source current can become in-phase with voltage without any harmonics.
From those test results, it is shown that the load power
factor is improved and harmonics is eliminated. The proposed control scheme is proven to be a good compensation
technique for such systems.

-6A

I
10

30

20

rns

Figure 7. Experimental result.

(a). Reference compensating current.
(b). Actual compensating current.

20

0.0

40

60

ni s

Figure 8. Experimental resullts for source voltagge and

current when the active filter is operated in harmonic
and reactive current compensation.

90/06/01

0.000

19:09

BRND:5

KHz

KH z

Figure 9. Harmonics spectrum of the source current.

592

0. References

5. Conclusion

1. H. Akagi, Y. Kanazawa and A. Nabae, Instan-

Since an active filter is used for the harmonic compensation and the static VAR control, it is important to
achieve an optimal design of various parameter which influences the performance. In this paper, a simulation p r e
gram is developed, which relates the current controllability to various design parameters for any arbitrary harmonic current. A phase- leading compensator is also has
designed to improve the system performance. A laboratory experiment system is established to verify the proposed design. From the simulations and experimental results, the following conclusions can be obtained.
Based on instantaneous power theorey, an inverter o p
erates as an active filter to filter harmonics and compensate the reactive current is proven. The compensation
harmonic and reactive current considered together will
become an appropriate choice for power system.
Essentially, the hysteresis control is better than the
ramp control for current mode control operation. But
higher switching frequency is required in hysteresis control. The ramp comparison control result in magnitude
error and phase-lagging to the reference current. In order to reduce the magnitude error and phase-lagging, a
phase-leading controller is proposed to improve the dynamic characteristics. From the simulation results and
bread-broad exeriment , the proposed controller can truly
reduce those errors.
The experimental results verifie that proposed control
scheme possesses good performance. For load current containing lower order harmonics, the proposed compensator
operates an excellent performance. However, it becomes
performance poor to compensate the higher order harmonics. In fact, the experimental results show the difference between the actual current and the reference signal.
some higher order harmonics do also exist in the source
current.

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5 93