Grid connected high power medium voltage wind energy conversion system with reduced line harmonics

Conventional high power medium voltage wind energy conversion systems utilize 12-pulse converter, integrated with Y/Y/Δ front-end transformer for grid interconnection. Fairly accepted performance can be achieved even by operating the 12-pulse converter using an optimized power locus for power factor improvement. In this paper, an active filter topology is proposed using only one shunt active power filter and tapped front-end transformer. The proposed topology features are simple configuration, less complexity, reduced components, and optimized compensation current requirement as it benefits from the front-end transformer´s natural mitigation of the harmonic currents. In addition to simulation, a low voltage scaled prototype is built to experimentally validate the proposed topology effectiveness.