D-STATCOM Control in Low Voltage Distribution System with Distributed Generation

For the last three decades, a large scale integration of distributed generation (DG) is beginning to change the electrical distribution network from passive to active. Consequently, technical difficulties are created by significant impacts generated by DGs with voltage variation being the dominant effect. This paper deals with operation and control of a distribution static synchronous compensator (D-STATCOM) for power quality improvement in asynchronous machine-based distributed generation as the asynchronous generator has poor voltage regulation specially, during peak load conditions. Application of D-STATCOM as voltage controller improves the overall performance of the distribution system significantly. The power quality issues like voltage regulation, load balancing and power flow are being analyzed and simulated in MATLAB. The D-STATCOM is realized using a three leg IGBT based pulse width modulation voltage source converter (PWM-VSC) having a DC bus capacitor. A hystersis rule based carrier-less PWM current controller is used to derive gating pulses for the IGBT switches. The Simulink model is developed and simulated in MATLAB, version R2007b . It is observed that DSTATCOM is effective in compensating reactive power, load balancing and harmonic elimination and improving the power quality of the distribution system.