Parallel operation of shunt active power filters with capacity limitation control

This paper presents a capacity-limitation technique to enlarge the power capacity that can be handled by the shunt active power filters (APFs). The capacity limited includes the reactive power as well as the amplitude of the distortion current supplied by the APFs. Under capacity-limitation control m+1 APFs supply the load reactive power with m APFs supplying their rated power and one APF supplying a fraction of its rated value. Similarly, n+1 APFs supply the load current harmonic with n APFs supplying the distortion current limited in amplitude and one APF supplying a fraction of its limited amplitude. Advantages of the proposed approach include high flexibility for extending system capacity, high reliability due to no control interconnection, reducing power capacity demand of APF, high modularity due to identical APFs, stable reactive power and harmonic current sharing and its performance is insensitive to parameters mismatch of APFs, cost-effective due to modularization, and so on. Three single-phase 1 KVA APFs are designed and implemented. The effectiveness is demonstrated by some experimental results.