A DC-Side Current Injection Method for Improving AC Line Condition Applied in the 18-Pulse Converter System

In this paper, a new compensation strategy for receiving clean power of a conventional 18-pulse ac/dc converter formed by three 6-diode bridges is proposed. According to the proposed strategy, a three-phase current-controlled inverter injects the compensation currents into the three positive terminals of the three six-diode bridges. The goal of injecting currents at dc side is to improve the quality of the ac line currents. Compared to the conventional active filter deployed at the ac side, the three-phase inverter used in this paper is with lower kVA rating, and the 18-pulse converter draws nearly sinusoidal currents from the ac main by the proposed compensation strategy. The theoretical compensation command is derived in this paper, and then an approximate approach is recommended to simplify the calculation. A digital-signal processor is employed as a digital controller to calculate the compensation command, and a 3-kW prototype including the 18-pulse converter and the current-controlled inverter is built for evaluation and measurement. Moreover, the performance affected by unbalanced ac source is investigated. The experimental results demonstrate that the proposed method not only improves the line current quality but also mitigates the effects caused by unbalanced source voltages.