A comparative analysis of three-phase four-wire UPQC topologies

The unified power quality conditioner (UPQC) is a power conditioning device, which is a integration of back to back connected shunt active power filter (APF) and series APF to a common DC link voltage. For improvement of power quality (PQ) problems in a three-phase four-wire distribution system, two topologies are proposed in this paper. A comparative analysis of these topologies along with the most common four-leg voltage source inverter (VSI) based topology of four-wire UPQC is discussed in this work. The performance of each topology of UPQC is evaluated for different PQ problems like power-factor correction, load balancing, current harmonic mitigation, voltage harmonic mitigation and source neutral current mitigation. The synchronous reference frame (SRF) theory is used as a control strategy of series and shunt APFs. The simulation results using MATLAB/Simulink environment are obtained, which support the effectiveness of these topologies of UPQC for power quality improvement.