Study and control of 5-level PWM rectifier-5-level NPC active power filter cascade using feedback control and redundant vectors

Authors: THAMEUR ABDELKRIM, EL MADJID BERKOUK, KARIMA BENAMRANE, TARAK BENSLIMANE

Abstract: The purpose of this paper is to develop a control and regulation method for the input DC voltages of a 5-level neutral point clamping (NPC) active power filter (APF). This APF is applied for the enhancement of medium-voltage network power quality by compensation of harmonic currents produced by an induction motor speed variator. In the first part, the authors present a topology of a 5-level NPC voltage source inverter and its simplified space vector pulse width modulation (SVPWM) control strategy. In the second part, the control strategy of the 5-level pulse width modulation current rectifier is presented. In the third part, to remedy to instability problem of the input DC voltages of the APF, the authors propose the feedback control of the 5-level rectifier associated with a simplified SVPWM with the redundant vectors method for the 5-level APF. After that, the sliding mode regulator used to control the APF is developed. The application of the proposed control algorithm offers the possibility of stabilizing the DC voltages of the APF. The stable DC bus supply associated with the sliding regulator of the APF allows the obtainment of low-harmonic content network currents with unity power factor. The instability problem associated with the use of the multilevel APF is solved. The obtained results are full of promise for the use of the multilevel APF in medium-voltage and high-power applications.

Keywords: Active power filter, NPC multilevel converter, space vector pulse width modulation, redundant vectors, feedback control

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