Extension of inductor voltage control to three-phase buck-type AC-DC converter

A novel inductor voltage control (IVC) method capable of achieving near unity power factor is being proposed for buck-type AC-DC pulsewidth-modulated (PWM) converters. In this method, the input inductor voltages are kept within a hysteresis band about a sinusoidal template, thus ensuring sinusoidal input currents. This control method is much less sensitive to parameter and control variations than the existing delta modulation control (DMC) method. A companion paper has introduced the IVC method for the case of a single-phase buck-type converter. In the present paper, problems involved in direct extension of the IVC method to a three-phase buck converter are discussed first. Following this, a new switching logic scheme is proposed which enables these problems to be overcome and for IVC (as well as DMC) to be extended to a three-phase converter as well. Detailed simulation and experimental results have been provided to verify the expected good performance with IVC. The proposed IVC method has potential in applications such as those requiring AC-DC rectifiers with current limiting.