Suppressing Conducted DM EMI in an Active Power Filter via Periodic Carrier Frequency Modulation

Abstract

Active power filters (APF) aim at solving the harmonic problem originated by the nonlinear load in power systems. However, the high dv/dt and di/dt outputs from power electronic devices in a voltage source converter on APF introduced unwanted conducted electromagnetic interference (EMI) when compensating for the low-frequency harmonic components. Hence, this paper develops a spectrum analysis approach to investigate and quantify the source differential-mode (DM) voltage of a single-phase shunt APF to suppress the DM EMI via periodic carrier frequency modulation (PCFM). In this scheme, the analytical expressions of source DM voltage in the APF using the PCFM scheme are obtained with a double Fourier series. In addition, the influence of PCFM parameters on the source DM voltage spectrum is predicted based on the analytical expression. As a result, the PCFM parameters, which have the best suppression effect on the DM EMI are obtained. The experiment results proved the validity of the sawtooth PCFM APF with the maximum frequency deviation equal to 800 Hz in alleviating the APF DM EMI.

Keywords

• active power filter (APF)
• differential-mode (DM) voltage
• electromagnetic interference (EMI)
• periodic carrier frequency modulation (PCFM)
• pulse width modulation (PWM)