A Current Source Converter based Active Power Filter for mitigation of harmonics at the interface of distribution and transmission systems

A medium power Current Source Converter (CSC) based Active Power Filter (APF) system is designed and implemented to suppress the amplification of low order harmonics at the Medium Voltage (MV) interface bus between the distribution and transmission systems, owing to the presence of large shunt capacitor banks installed only for reactive power compensation. For this purpose, four CSC based APF units designed at 1.0 kV are operated in parallel, and connected to the 31.5 kV MV bus via a specially designed coupling transformer. In each APF module, a specially designed LC-type input filter eliminates the switching ripples, and active damping method embedded into the control software suppresses harmonic frequencies around the natural frequency of the input filter. The resulting system can operate at relatively high frequencies in the range from 2.0 to 3.0 kHz, depending upon which selected harmonics among 5^th, 7^th, 11^th, and 13^th are to be eliminated. Furthermore, in order to reduce the installed capacity of CSCs, Selective Harmonic Amplification Method (SHAM) is applied to the APF system described in the paper. MV APF system has been built as a mobile system for temporary connection to a problematic MV interface bus, until a permanent solution is found for that location in the distribution system.