Design of a power flow control method for hybrid active front-end converters

Active front-end converters with bidirectional power flow capability have been extensively used for utility applications of power electronics. Large passive filters are normally required at the grid side of the converter to mitigate switching EMI noise. This may become a critical issue, in terms of installation space and potential resonance of the passive filter. This paper proposes a hybrid active front-end converter and its power flow control method. The hybrid converter is composed of a capacitor and a voltage source converter in series connection. Bidirectional real power of the converter can be controlled by the output voltage vector perpendicular to the grid voltage, and reactive power delivery of the converter for grid voltage regulation can be determined by the output voltage vector parallel to the grid voltage. Due to series connection capacitor, the converter can be operated between a low-voltage DC side and high-voltage grid side without any low-frequency transformer, which is the significant advantage of the proposed method. A harmonic resistance is also emulated in the proposed method to assure stable operation of the converter for unintentional voltage spike coming from the power system. Operation principles are explained in detail, and computer simulations and experimental results are provided to validate the effectiveness of the proposed approach.