Power Quality Improvement by UPQC based on Voltage Source Converters

In modern power system consists of wide range of electrical, electronic and power electronic equipment in commercial and industrial applications. Since most of the electronic equipment’s are nonlinear in nature these will induce harmonics in the system, which affect the sensitive loads to be fed from the system. These problems are partially solved with the help of LC passive filters. However, this kind of filter cannot solve random variation in the load current wave form and voltage wave form. Active filters can resolve this problem. However, the cost of active filters is high. They are difficult to implement in large scale. Additionally, they also present lower efficiency than shunt passive filters. One of the many solutions is the use of a combined system of shunt and active series filters like Unified Power Quality Conditioner (UPQC) which aims at achieving a low cost under highly effective control. The UPQC device combines a shunt active filter together with a series active filter in a back-to-back configuration, to simultaneously compensate the supply voltage and the load current or to mitigate any type of voltage and current fluctuations and power factor correction in a power distribution network, such that improved power quality can be made available at the point of common coupling. The control strategies are modeled using MATLAB/SIMULINK. The performance is also observed under influence of utility side disturbances such as harmonics and voltage sags. The simulation results are compared without and with UPQC for the verification of results.