Design and implementation of a high performance aeronautical active power filter

With the progress of “More Electric Aircraft”, power capacity of aircraft electric power system is increased. It is not easy for the power-quality characteristics of the system to be in compliance with the harmonic standards by using traditional method to compensate the harmonics introduced by the nonlinear load. Active power filter (APF) gets increasing usage in 50Hz power system for its high performance compensation behavior. In this paper, APF technology is introduced to solve the harmonic problem of aircraft electric power system. Based on analysis and updating two core function modules of APF: current reference generation module and current tracking module, source current direct control strategy and cascaded inverter topology is applied in the proposed aeronautical active power filter (AAPF). Global framework, key technology, and operation principle of the proposed AAPF are presented. In order to verify the compensation performance of the proposed AAPF, a prototype with 1kVA power rating is built and test in the laboratory. Experimental results show that good compensation results are achieved in various kinds of nonlinear load condition.