Active damping control of a high power PWM current source rectifier for line current THD reduction

The use of active damping to reduce the total harmonic distortion (THD) of the line current for medium voltage (2.3 kV to 7.2 kV) high-power PWM current source rectifiers is investigated. The rectifier requires an LC filter connected at its input terminals, which constitutes an LC resonant mode. The lightly damped LC filter is prone to series and parallel resonances when tuned to a system harmonic either from the utility or from the PWM rectifier. These issues are traditionally addressed at the design stage by properly choosing the filter resonant frequency. This approach may result in a limited performance since the LC resonant frequency is a function of the power system impedance, which usually varies with power system operating conditions. In this paper, an active damping control method is proposed for the reduction in line current THD of high power current source rectifiers operating at a switching frequency of only 540 Hz. Two types of LC resonances are investigated: the parallel resonance excited by harmonic currents drawn by the rectifier and the series resonance caused by harmonic pollution in the source voltage. It is demonstrated through simulation and experiments that the proposed active damping control can effectively reduce the line current THD caused by both parallel and series resonances.