Capacitor Voltage Shaper for Cascaded H-Bridge StatCom

In this paper, an active shaping method of the capacitor voltage for a cascaded H-bridge (CHB) Iow-capacitance static synchronous compensator (LC-StatCom) is introduced. The traditional LC-StatCom is able to operate with large capacitor voltage ripples when it is operating with rated current. However, as the current is reduced below rated current, voltage ripple on the capacitors decreases. Decreasing the current therefore removes the advantages of the LC-StatCom such as better current quality and reduced switching losses. The active shaping method aims to keep consistent large voltage ripple on the capacitor using a simple boost converter cell to inject an appropriate auxiliary capacitor current. Simulation results are provided to confirm the performance of the proposed CHB-StatCom system.