The Improved Unified Power Quality Conditioner with the Modular Multilevel Converter for Power Quality Improvement

Nowadays, researchers focus on the modular multilevel converter (MMC), due to its modularity structure, effective sharing of voltages among the submodule switches, and betterment in the quality of the voltage and current waveforms. First, the conventional unified power quality conditioner is developed with two level voltage source converters connected back-to-back, which are proposed to mitigate both the voltage and current related power quality problems. Later, to improve the performances (voltage sag, swell, current harmonics, etc.) of the conventional method, multilevel inverters are used. In this paper, a modified unified power quality conditioner based on a modular multilevel converter is implemented to mitigate the voltage and current related power quality issues. The design of the MMC is very simple with a modular structure, and it also improves the performance of the system compared to the conventional methods. In this proposed topology, the voltage related compensation is implemented with a seven-level MMC, and the current compensation is achieved with a reduced four switch voltage source inverter. The developed system is simulated in the MATLAB platform, and results are validated by hardware implementation with a FPGA controller. It is observed that the developed system has less % of total harmonic distortion and reduction in voltage sag as per the prescribed IEEE 519-2014 standards and practices.