Design of a DSTATCOM using a 5-level cascade asymmetric multilevel converter

The power quality in distribution systems is affected by the pollution introduced by the customers. One way to improve the power quality is using a DSTATCOM to compensate reactive power and harmonics. The use of multilevel inverters in medium voltage applications is a good solution. In particular, the cascaded asymmetric multilevel converter (CAMC) appears as a very attractive alternative among the 5-level converters for this application. In this paper, the design of a DSTATCOM employing a CAMC in a medium voltage distribution power system, is presented. The model and the control strategy are discussed in d-q coordinates. The performance of the proposed compensator is tested with SPICE simulations.