Effective Harmonic Cancellation Technique for a Three-Phase Four-Wire System

Abstract

An excess non-linear and unbalanced load application increases the power quality (PQ) problem by injecting harmonic current. The avoidance of neutral current control creates additional PQ problems due to excess circulating current in modern 3φ4W applications. Therefore, this manuscript suggests improved αβ transform-based voltage and current control approaches for both 3φ3W and 3φ4W shunt active filter (SAF) applications. In the proposed approach, a novel combined voltage and current (NCVC) control approach is presented for modern 3φ3W systems by using voltage and closed-loop current controllers. However, due to the absence of a neutral current, the NCVC is not sufficient for 3φ4W system application. Therefore, by considering the current reference parameter generated from the NCVC, a novel harmonic compensation technique (NHCT) is proposed with proper mathematical expressions for the 3φ4W application. To show the importance of NHCT over traditional P-Q-R control, the developed MATLAB/Simulink model is tested by using different 1φ and 3φ nonlinear/unbalanced load conditions. The comparative results indicate that, by using NHCT, the 3φ4W system contains a lesser total harmonic distortion (THD) and harmonic mitigation ratio (HMR), less ripple frequency, an improved power factor, a lesser neutral current, and a balanced active/reactive power condition. From the above comparative analysis results, it is found that the overall improvement percentage is 66.78%. The above findings justify the significance of the NCVC and NHCT approach during both unbalanced and non-linear load-based 3φ4W applications.

Keywords

• shunt active filter (SAF)
• non-linear/unbalanced load
• power quality (PQ)
• novel harmonic compensation technique (NHCT)