DC-link capacitance estimation in AC/DC/AC PWM converters using voltage injection

In this paper, a new online capacitance estimation method for dc-link capacitors in a three-phase ac/dc/ac pulsewidth-modulation converter is proposed. A controlled ac voltage with a lower frequency than the line frequency is injected into the dc-link voltage, which then causes ac power ripples at the dc output side. By extracting the ac power component on the dc output side using digital filters, the capacitance can then be calculated using a support vector regression method. A function that defines the relation between a given capacitor power and its corresponding capacitance is determined using a set of training data. This function is then used to predict the output for the given input which is not included in the training set. The proposed method can be simply implemented with only software and no additional hardware. Experimental results confirm that the estimation error is less than 0.15%.