A new approach for optimal shunt active power filter control considering alternative performance indices

A new steady-state approach for determining the optimal shunt active power filter (APF) reference compensation current injections to control harmonic currents generated by the nonlinear load and for reactive power compensation under ideal or nonideal supply voltages are presented in the paper. Conventionally, the compensation currents injected by the shunt APF are determined to eliminate harmonic currents of the load. However, when considering different APF performance indices such as minimizing source current distortion and maximizing compensated load power factor, the issues related to sizing the APF to meet IEEE-519 harmonic current limits and other constraints such as current imbalance limits and minimum load power factor requirement are rarely investigated. In the paper, a new theory of APF control in the a-b-c lreference frame is proposed to determine the APF current injections to meet different constraints with an optimal APF size, where the filter control strategy is formulated as a nonlinear programming problem and is solved to find the optimal current injections. Results obtained by simulations with Matlab/Simulink show that the proposed approach is more flexible and effective than the conventional approaches on compensating reactive power and harmonic currents of the load. Index Terms--Active power filter, IEEE-519, nonlinear programming, reference compensation current, reference-frame transformation.