Power Quality Improvement by Direct Power Control of Active Front End Rectifier

Active fronts End Rectifiers (AFE) are used as a powerful tool for Harmonic Mitigation. This paper proposes a new development of Direct Power Control (DPC) in AFE Rectifier technologies that are utilized to mitigate harmonics in utility power lines. In this paper, Voltage Oriented Control (VOC) based Direct Power control (DPC) of three phases PWM Rectifier with reduced input harmonics and improved power factor is presented. In the proposed Direct Power Control based on Voltage Oriented Control scheme, instantaneous active and reactive powers provided by harmonic component of input currents are directly controlled using predefined switching table with 12 switching states. A complete simulation model is developed using MATLAB/Simulink in order to test the performance of VOC based DPC of PWM rectifier and compared with SVPWM based AFE Rectifier. Results show effective harmonic compensation at front end for DPC based PWM rectifier and the current THD is 3.3% which is well below the IEEE standards. Also almost unity power factor is achieved with significant power ripple reduction and more sinusoidal grid current can be observed in DPC.