ACTIVE FILTER FOR IMPROVING A SWITCHED RELUCTANCE MOTOR DRIVE’s INPUT POWER QUALITY

This thesis develops a hardware circuit implementation of an active filter for reducing a SRM drive’s input current ripple or equivalently to improve the SRM drive’s input power quality. It’s an alternative to the simple inductor and capacitor in a conventional passive filter. For the same filtering capability the size of the two physical capacitors in the active filter will be much less than the size of the capacitor in a conventional filter. Also the size of the two inductors in the active filter will be much less than the size of the inductor in a conventional filter. Some of this size reduction will be consumed by the power semiconductors but their size is much smaller than the filter components being replaced. This thesis describes the design of the active filter circuit which can replace the conventional passive filter. In this thesis, feedback control is also used with the active filter to force the filter voltage to be the desired value to minimize the effects of the circuit’s resonances. The active filter circuit is tested experimentally with a test circuit that mimics the current ripple generated by an SRM drive system. The experimentally generated output is verified by comparing it with simulation results fro