Design of high efficiency and compact filter inductor for D-StatCom inverter

Usage of Renewable Energy Sources (RES) such as wind and photovoltaic became popular to generate electricity and supply power back to the distribution network. As most grids were developed centuries ago and were not designed for electrical power flowing backwards, distributed generation also causes some problems of grid instability including unbalanced and excessive power. In order to overcome these issues, the introduction of Distributed Static Synchronous Compensators (D-StatCom), combined with an energy storage system can help to solve these problems. One of the most important components is the filter inductors inside a StatCom. This paper is dealing with a novel filter inductor which is utilizing an EE-core consisting of Sendust powder material and is designed with two different windings structures; copper strip and normal wire. This filter inductor has a dual function; filtering high frequencies and smoothing the current at low frequencies. Main focus of this design was maintaining a small physical size, light weight and benefits from lower losses, in high current operating region in comparison to current inductor design. In addition to that the proposed inductor is very cost effective. Numerical methods and measurements have been employed to validate the results.