A comparative study of active power filter reference compensation approaches

This paper present a comparative study of the effectiveness of six approaches for determining reference compensation currents of shunt active power filters to maintain sinusoidal source currents supplied to nonlinear loads. These approaches to be compared include instantaneous reactive power theory, instantaneous power theory based on symmetrical components, generalized instantaneous reactive power theory, synchronous reference frame method, synchronous detection method, and a novel approach in the a-b-c reference frame based on symmetrical components. Simulation results show that the six approaches are all effective on compensating reactive and harmonic components of load currents under ideal source voltages. However, when the source voltages are either unbalanced or nonsinusoidal, each approach presents inconsistent results on maintaining sinusoidal source current.