A study on the control method of series active power filter for compensation of harmonics and reactive power

This paper presents a control algorithm for a 3-phase 3-wire series active power filter. This control algorithm compensates the harmonics and reactive power which are generated by nonlinear loads, such as a diode or a thyristor rectifier. This control method is using the generalized p-q theory. It is applied to both harmonic voltage source and harmonic current source. The advantage of this control method is the direct extraction of compensation voltage references. Therefore, the calculation of the compensation voltage reference is simpler than other control methods. The compensation principle of the proposed control method is presented in detail in this paper. A three-phase three-wire series active power filter of a laboratory prototype has been manufactured and some experiments have been carried out for showing the effectiveness of the proposed control algorithm.