Cascaded three-level inverter based shunt active filter for power conditioning application

In past few years, multilevel inverters have shown considerable advantages over traditional two-level inverters in a majority of the high power high voltage and medium voltage industrial applications. As a consequence, the cascaded multilevel inverter (CMI) configuration has grabbed tremendous interest in the power industry. Now-a-days, with the increasing usage of power electronic devices by industrial, commercial and domestic consumers, power quality is deteriorating at a rigorous pace. In this paper, a cascaded three-level inverter based shunt active power filter (APF) has been modeled in order to handle large compensation currents and reduce the power loss occurring due to switching of semiconductor devices. Current harmonics produced due to a non-linear diode rectifier load is compensated using the three-level inverter based APF. An evaluation is carried out with MATLAB/Simulink based simulations to investigate its current harmonic compensation capability under ideal, distorted and unbalanced supply conditions.