Power Dissipation Measurements at Power Pulsation Compensators for Single-Phase Grid-Connected Converters

To achieve constant power flow on the dc side of single-phase grid-connected ac–dc converters, a device to compensate the power pulsation of the grid is required. When calculating the power losses of such a compensator device using the measured terminal current and voltage, there is a very significant sensitivity to errors in current measurement, which may render the result implausible. This work proposes a novel filtering method to postprocess the acquired measurement signals to continuously eliminate the measurement errors, utilizing properties of the structure of typical compensator circuits and an additional voltage measurement. Two case studies, one involving a passive and the other an active absorption circuit, demonstrate that this method provides satisfactory measurement results for the power dissipation using standard measurement equipment. Therefore, it is possible to avoid the use of sophisticated instruments or alternative methods, such as, for example, more laborious calorimetric methods, by employing the proposed approach.