Practical Design of a Three-Phase Active Power-Line Conditioner Controlled by Artificial Neural Networks

Today, there is an increase of harmonic pollution in electrical systems due to the use of nonlinear loads. Thus, the current and voltage waveforms are nonsinusoidal. The active powerline conditioners (APLCs) are used to compensate the generated harmonics and to correct the load power factor. In this paper, a new APLC control design based on artificial neural networks is developed. Adaptive networks estimate the control reference compensation currents, and a feedforward network (trained by a backpropagation algorithm) implements the pulsewidth-modulation (PWM) control method used. An experimental prototype was built to test the proposed design. The practical results confirm the possibility and usefulness of controlling an APLC by means of artificial neural networks.