Passive Reactor Compensated Cascaded H-Bridge Multilevel LC-StatCom

The cascaded H-bridge (CHB) low-capacitance StatCom (LC-StatCom) has a limited operating area in the inductive region compared to a conventional StatCom's V-I characteristic. This limitation for operation in the inductive region is considered to be the biggest disadvantage of CHB LC-StatCom. In this paper, the effect of adding parallel and series reactors on the LC-StatCom system's V-I characteristic is analyzed. Then, a new configuration, which fully compensates for the lost operating area of the LC-StatCom, is introduced. A scaled down single-phase seven-level laboratory prototype is used to confirm practicability of the proposed system.