This paper proposes a hybrid active power filter (HAPF) with multi-coupled coils, applied to a medium- and high-voltage power grid. The passive filter of the proposed HAPF adopts the structure of multi-coupled coils to compress the traditional multiple LC branches into one branch which presents the same harmonic impedance characteristics as the former multiple LC branches. In the active power filter of the HAPF, a coupled inductor, instead of a transformer, is used to connect with the passive filter. The coupled inductor has mutual inductances with inductors of the passive filter. Through spatial magnetic coupling, the active power filter can inject compensation current into the power grid to eliminate the residual harmonics and absorb active power from the power grid to maintain the DC capacitor voltage. When the active power filter is open-circuited or short-circuited, the filtering effect of the passive filter can still be guaranteed, which improves the reliability of the filter. The benefits of the proposed HAPF with excellent harmonic filtering performance are that the inductors occupy only 1/3 space as compared with traditional three-tuned LC filter, and very small power of the active power filter. The feasibility of the proposed HAPF is verified through simulations and experiment.

High-voltage withstand tests are essential for electric equipment like power transformers, electric cable lines, gas insulated switchgears etc. The partial discharge (PD) measurement for such equipment under applied high voltage is also required at the same time. Pulse Width Modulation (PWM)-based variable frequency power supply (VFPS) finds wide applications in the series resonance high-voltage testing circuits. However, the steep rising and falling voltage edges in the PWM process will produce large amount of partial discharge interference in a wide spectrum range, which will confuse the real partial discharge signal of the device and lead to the wrong estimation of the insulation status. This paper proposes a new VFPS based on the highefficiency linear power amplifier without PD interference. The topology and principle of the VFPS are given and discussed. A prototype rated at 232 V/35 A was designed and constructed to verify the feasibility of the proposed VFPS. Physical experiments were carried out on the prototype.This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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The input part of the high-voltage test power supply is usually composed of switching devices; however, the pulse-type periodic interference caused by the switching devices makes the monitoring of the test power supply partial discharge more difficult. Therefore, this paper proposes a high-efficiency and distortion-free linear power supply based on piecewise-linearization with all N-type transistor. Under the same DC input, multiple power transistors are connected to different taps of the same transformer. By controlling the period of linear conduction of each power transistor in turn, we ensure that the power transistor works on the linear side (biased towards saturation) to reduce its conduction voltage drop and the output realizes sinusoidal piecewise linearization, so that the converter can greatly improve the system efficiency. After that, from the perspective of the lowest sum of the transistor loss, an optimization method for the design of the multi-winding transformer ratio at each stage is proposed. Finally, a power supply prototype based on four-piece linear converter with an output voltage of 220 V was built. The experimental efficiency reaches 87.03%, and, additionally, if the linear amplification is divided into more sections, the efficiency can be further improved.