Design and Implementation of Sensorless Voltage Control of Front-End Rectifier for Power Quality Improvement in Telecom System

In this paper, a three-phase three-switch three-level boost (Vienna) type pulse-width modulation rectifier is proposed as an active front-end power factor correction (PFC) rectifier for power quality improvement in telecom load. A sensorless voltage control technique is proposed and it does not rely on any input voltage information results in reliable and robust operation. A brief description on the principle of operation and the most advantageous modulation method of the proposed system are discussed. The feasible switching states are identified for the proposed active front-end converter resulting in reduced switching stress and dc ripples. A triangular carrier based control logic is applied and the input current reaches sinusoidal shape without the need of sensing the input voltage. The detailed analysis of front-end PFC converter is carried out by equivalent circuit analysis. Also, the complete loss and efficiency calculation of the converter is explicitly carried out with the help of hardware design guidelines. The performance of the proposed system and its capability of operating satisfactorily in the event of failure of one phase of the mains is verified through MATLAB Simulation, and the results obtained are presented. The experimental setup rated for 9 kW is developed in the laboratory to validate the simulation results. From the simulation and hardware results, it is observed and recorded that the power quality parameters are improved and are well within the IEEE and IEC standards.