Behavior of PWM Active Front Ends in the Presence of Parallel Thyristor Converters

This paper investigates the effects of grid voltage distortions caused by thyristor converters on the steady-state performance of a pulsewidth modulation (PWM) rectifier with dc voltage link for low-voltage applications. The disturbance transfer function of the current control loop is used to analyze the effects of grid distortions. Influences of the current controller, the phase-locked loop parameters, and the filter inductance on the generated current harmonics are presented. For existing grid voltage harmonics, the amplitude of the corresponding current harmonics are determined and compared to measured current harmonics using a 400-V 40-kW test bench consisting of a PWM rectifier with voltage dc link parallel to a 40-kW thyristor converter.