Novel design method for the inductor of active power filter based on four-dimensional visualization algorithm

To guarantee the compensation performance of active power filter (APF), LCL filter is usually used to filter out the switching harmonics. Due to the complicated design process, repetitive verification steps and limitations of solution set, traditional inductor design method is hard to meet the requirements perfectly. This paper firstly analyzes the inductor parameters according to the demands for suppressing the ripple current and tracking maximum current variation. Then a novel multi-objective four-dimensional visualization algorithm based design method for inductors is proposed. The ternary function representations between each design objective and three independent variables are established. On this basis, through the visualization programming, intuitive four-dimensional visualized design results are obtained. Further, analytical solution set that meet all expected objectives can be acquired by intersecting the sub-solution sets. Finally, corresponding inductors are manufactured and applied to a 50kVA APF prototype. The results have indicated the feasibility and validity of the proposed method.