Efficient Hybrid Shunt Active Power Filter for Improvement of Power Factor and Harmonic Suppression using MATLAB

Power quality management is the main problem that the industry is facing today. This is mainly affected by the generation of harmonics. The growing use of electronic equipment produces a large amount of harmonics in distribution systems because of non-sinusoidal currents consumed by non-linear loads. As we know for the better quality of power, the voltage and current waveforms should be sinusoidal, but in actual practice it is somewhat disturbed and this phenomenon is called “Harmonic Distortion”. Voltage harmonics are generally present in supply of power from utility. Even though electronic and non-linear devices are flexible, economical and energy efficient, they may degrade power quality by creating harmonic currents and consuming excessive reactive power. The two approaches using which the harmonic distortions can be suppressed are passive and active filtering. The passive filtering is the simplest conventional solution to mitigate the harmonic distortion. Although simple, the use of passive element do not always responds correctly to the dynamics of the power distribution systems. Active filters can be applied to a single non-linear load or many. They provide controlled current injection to remove harmonic current from the source side of electric system and also can improve the power factor. This work presents a method capable of designing power filters to reduce harmonic distortion and correct the power factor by which the power quality of a distribution system can be improved. The simulation results of the nonlinear systems have been carried out with MATLAB 7.6.