New control method of active power quality compensator with reduced-capacity three-leg inverter for electrified railways

This paper proposes a new control method for reducing the capacity of an active power quality compensator with a three-leg inverter used in electrified railways. In the proposed control method, the fundamental reactive and unbalanced-active components of the load currents are detected. The non-active and unbalanced-active components are compensated on the source side with the fundamental reactive power control. This reactive power control reduces the capacity of the three-leg inverter, which performs the active power quality compensator. The basic principle of the proposed control method is discussed in detail, and then confirmed by digital computer simulation using the PSIM software. A reduced-scale experimental model is constructed and tested. Experimental results demonstrate that the balanced sinusoidal source currents with the power factor of 0.9 are obtained reducing the capacity of the three-leg inverter by 13% as compared to the already proposed control method.