Active Harmonics Compensation in Smart Grids

The quality of electric power is a key factor for the electricity supply service. It defines how good the characteristics of the supplied power meet the standard ones. Among several other power quality issues, the harmonics are of more and more concern over the last decades. This is essentially due to the widespread use of electronic components. This thesis focuses on the development of a voltage active power filter implementing a new selective harmonics compensation algorithm. The first design is described as following: band-pass filters decompose the measured voltage signal as a sum of different harmonics voltages; PLLs (frequency-tuned) transform of the oscillating signals into two orthogonal and rotating components (dq-transform). The dq-components of each harmonic are controlled to zero using standard PI-controllers and the compensating harmonics waves are generated via the inverse PLL. All the harmonics compensating waves are superimposed and added to the fundamental reference signal. This represents the final control signal of the inverter. Implemented in the MATLAB-SIMULINK simulation environment, this foreseen methodology depicted as major issue the control stability especially when the system frequency differs from the rated 50-Hertz frequency. This is the reason why a second design has been proposed. The major improvement is done on the harmonics detection stability by replacing the PLLs frames by the well-known internal frame of the fundamental voltage of the controlled inverter. After the convincing theoretical results from the simulations, the method is implemented and validated experimentally on a test rig in the lab. The two key features of the developed active power filter (APF) are: 1)Its ability to be used as a standalone power unit that compensates by itself the harmonics that could appear in the system while generating the fundamental voltage necessary to build up the micro-grid. 2)Its ability to serve as a full grid-tied power element that not only mitigates the voltages harmonics on the coupled grid but also supports the grid by controlling the exchanged active and reactive powers between the inverter and the grid. In addition to the developed harmonic mitigation technique, a new grid synchronization method has been proposed along with a new power control algorithm combined with a grid impedance estimator for grid-tied inverter. Further investigations and development are required for three-phase unbalance voltage systems as well as for single-phase voltage power system for low power grids.