Selective Harmonic Compensation (SHC) PWM for Grid-Interfacing High-Power Converters

Compensating the grid background harmonics in a grid-interfacing converter system, such as a drive system's active-front-end rectifier or a grid-connected inverter in a distributed generation system, is an effective method of reducing line side current harmonics. However, this harmonic compensation is particularly challenging in medium-voltage high-power applications (>1 MVA). This is mainly due to the low-switching frequency operation of high-power converters (300–800 Hz) to maintain low power loss. Therefore, the traditional tasks of active power filters with relatively high-switching frequency cannot be easily realized here. This paper proposes a new pulse width modulation technique, named selective harmonic compensation (SHC), which actively compensates the power system background harmonics, but still operates at very low-switching frequencies. Details of the proposed SHC are presented. An SHC application example on a high-power current-source rectifier is provided in this paper. The simulations and experiments show that the proposed SHC scheme can effectively compensate the system background harmonics and improve the line current harmonic performance.