A simple method to optimize DC-bus capacitor in 3-phase shunt Active power filter system

This paper introduces a shunt active power filter with a small DC bus capacitor by adding additional low-pass filter (LPF). The DC link voltage fluctuation is impressively suppressed with a small value in spite of the low value of DC-link capacitor under the steady-state condition. Consequently, the cost and volume of power converter are significantly reduced thanks to the reduced value of DC-bus capacitor. On the other hand, an indirect control strategy is used to maintain grid-side current when non-linear loads are connected to the system. By using proportional-integral (PI) and modified repetitive controller (RC) in dq0 frame, the calculation time is greatly decreased by 6 times compared with the conventional RC, and the number of measurement devices is also minimized. As a result, the acquired total harmonic distortion (THD) is lower than 2% regardless of the load conditions. Simulation results are carried out in order to verify the effectiveness of the proposed control strategy.