Implementation of the shunt harmonic voltages compensation approach

Instead of injecting harmonic currents to compensate those drawn by distorting loads, in this paper a shunt active filter is used for generating harmonic voltages to compensate harmonic voltages at the point of common coupling; the main advantage in using such a compensation approach is that, when the aim is to reduce or eliminate the harmonic voltages at the point of common coupling only one active filter is required. For determining the harmonic voltages such a filter must generate, two simple and practical methods are proposed in this paper; the effectiveness of these methods was evaluated using a 1-kW prototype of an active filter operating according to the shunt harmonic voltage compensation approach. In addition, the laboratory results were comparable to those obtained with the ATP-EMTP simulation software.