Performance Evaluation of Shunt Active Power Filter Based on Parallel Multilevel Inverters

This paper presents energy quality performance evaluation of an active power filter (APF) based on parallel multilevel NPC inverters. High power energy conversion systems are usually engage modular power converter structures. They can be parallel or cascade ones. In this research it is shown that usage of parallel structure for active power filtering provides several advantages such as power sharing, improved compensation quality and efficiency. In particular, three-level NPC converters in parallel connection with interleaved PWM for APF are considered. Technical considerations of the energy quality performance are presented for more common case of k inverters in parallel. Simulation results are presented to prove the theoretical conclusions.