Power Quality Improvement of a Current-Pulsed Power Supply Based on a Three-Level NPC PWM VSI Scheme as an Active Power Filter

In this paper an evaluation of a three-level neutral point clamped (NPC) inverter which is integrated and shunt connected to a 12 V, 1 kW current-pulsed power supply (CPPS) is presented. The inverter is based on typical PWM (pulse-width modulation) VSI (voltage source inverter) and is employed as active powers filter (APF) and connected in parallel with the CPPS. APF is used to compensate reactive power and suppress characteristic harmonics drawn from a particular current-pulsed power supply which is a nonlinear load in nature. This type of power supply is mainly used by electro-deposition processes acting as the critical load to evaluate the proposed three-level NPC APF scheme. This type of pulsed power supplies can produce complex non periodic waveforms employed by the electrochemical industry. In particular, extensive simulation and experimental results are presented to validate the performance of this scheme acting as an active power filter