A New Design and Implementation of a Three-Phase Four-Wire Shunt Active Power Filter for Mitigating Harmonic Problems caused by Compact Fluorescent Lamps

Abstract

The massive embedding of nonlinear loads in industrial, commercial, and residential applications has created severe power quality problems in modern power distribution systems. Compact Fluorescent Lamps (CFLs), which have been designed to replace Incandescent Lamps (ILs), due to their lower energy consumption and longer lifetime, are among the most used non-linear loads. These electric devices, equipped with ballasts and power electronic converters, inject harmonic currents, reactive powers, and create unbalance in the electrical system. Active filters are widely implemented to overcome these issues and improve power quality. In this sense, a Shunt Active Power Filter (SAPF) is developed in this paper to eliminate the under-wanted harmonics caused by multiple CFLs and ameliorate the global power factor in 3-phase 4-wire systems. The suggested SAPF is connected in parallel with the loads and it consists of three main blocks, the reference current calculation block, the Voltage Source Inverter (VSI), and the VSI control block. The reference currents are calculated following the Synchronous Reference Frame (SRF) theory. Meanwhile, Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) based control is adopted for controlling the switching signals. In order to investigate the efficiency and applicability of the developed 3-phase 4-wire SAPF, different simulations and experimental tests are carried out. The measurements are performed by employing a power analyzer and are analyzed with the Power Pad III software. The obtained results disclosed that the proposed SAPF reduced the Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) of the CFL current from 89.6% to 1.62% and improved the power factor.