International Research Journal of Education and Technology

With advancement in technology, there has been an increase in usage of power electronic converters/loads for various industrial applications and process automation. Power electronic loads inject harmonic currents into the utility causing overheating of power transformers and neutral wires, unpredictable performance of protection systems etc. In addition, electric resonances in such loads can also cause other undesirable phenomena like voltage fluctuations, radio frequency interference (RFI) etc. To mitigate these undesirable effects, a new generation of power electronics converter (Active Filters) is being considered. Technical review of recent trends in the area of active filters is presented in this paper. Finally, this paper discusses the trends in the design of active filters and the factors affecting them.

Keywords: Harmonics, Active filter, multilevel inverter, series and hybrid filters