Power Electronic Converters – New Trends in Power Quality of Low Voltage Power Grids

Abstract 

Power quality problems are of high actuality. Voltage and current harmonics compensation as well as control or compensation of power factor in low voltage grids can be today performed by using intelligent power electronic converters, instead of using high cost, environment unfriendly capacitors and passive filters. Active filter based configurations are used for harmonic compensation introduced by nonlinear consumers. For the active power factor conditioning, PWM controlled voltage converters can be used. To achieve both harmonics and power factor compensation, we need complex conditioning using intelligent controlled double sided voltage converters. The exponential evolution of increased performances of power electronic switching devices (high power, high switching frequency, low size) and the inverse exponential draw of costs for power electronic devices and power electronic converters makes solutions presented in this paper as a possible and desired trend in power quality problems.

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