PSO based Optimum Design of Passive Interfacing Elements of UPQC

Unified Power Quality Conditioner (UPQC) is a universal Power Quality (PQ) compensator for most of the PQ issues such as voltage sag, swell, harmonics, load current distortion, poor power factor and unbalance. Various control and design techniques have been proposed in the literature to enhance the compensation abilities of UPQC with reduced size and cost. Interfacing elements such as inductors and RC filters are invariably used in UPQC to suppress unwanted components like switching ripples, and their design remains a challenge due to heavy interdependency. This paper proposes a Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) based design method to find the optimum value of these interfacing elements with the aim of optimizing key performance indices such as Total Harmonic Distortion (THD), power factor, power losses, and voltage regulation. The proposed method is applied on a case study system in MATLAB/Simulink. The obtained results are found to be better than existing approach to designing interfacing elements.