Performance enhancement strategies for power converters

Abstract

The industrial world continues to witness an unprecedented automation in view of the technological advancements in the field of solid state electronics. The utilities pioneer a resurgence to cater to the sophisticated requirements of the domestic environment. It mandates a revolution to exploit the developments and elicit mechanisms to address the governing issues. The increasing reliance on power electronic converters as inexplicable interfaces augurs to serve the dictates of the operating status. It thereby creates a focus to endure a need to guarantee the desired voltage in the appropriate frequency range. There appears to be a lot of emphasis on the role of strategies that accord the satisfactory operation of the power switching devices. Power electronics is an enabling technology that pervades the energy scenario and extends the scope of its use through specific well defined entities called power converters. The converters are oriented to act as clean interfaces between the electrical systems and the loads. The higher efficiency, greater flexibility and tighter control features of this domain are becoming attractive for applications in motion control by replacing the earlier electro-mechanical and electronic systems. The performance of a modulation algorithm relates itself directly to the harmonic content of the output voltage. The most widely used measure to quantify the harmonics present in the output of converters is the total harmonic distortion (THD). The other indices that the converter system needs to cater to are the distortion factor and the input power factor. It is in this perspective that it is proposed to investigate the benefits of widely used pulse width modulation (PWM) techniques on a host of converters. Besides efforts to develop new topologies are part of the exercise that attempts to meet the requirements of power utilities. The methodologies are designed to be tailor made to enable the load to harness the available power, at the projected target output voltage newline