Neutral-Point Potential Balance Control Strategy on Three-Level Active Power Filters

This paper presents a simplified strategy in neutral-point (NP) potential balance of the neutral-point-clamped (NPC) three-level three-wire active power filter (APF). By introducing a simplified carrier-based pulse width modulation (CB-PWM) strategy and analysing the occurrence mechanism of NP potential unbalance, we proposed a NP potential balancing control strategy based on the simplified strategy. With this strategy, the NP current in a sampling period can be calculated through the detection of compensating current of APF. The three phase's duration time of reference voltage can also be computed through detecting the voltage fluctuation of upper and lower capacitors accurately, according to the law of charge conservation. Experiment results show that this proposed approach with simplified computation can effectively achieve NP potential balance.