A novel high-performance voltage regulator for single-phase AC sources

Regulation of load voltage in single-phase applications is becoming an important issue for critical loads. This paper presents a novel high-performance single-phase voltage regulator which has a common arm between the rectifier and inverter, and adopts an appropriate switching strategy. The proposed voltage regulator employs six switches and can be implemented by only one three-phase inverter module. The proposed voltage regulator has the capability of delivering sinusoidal input current with unity power factor, good output voltage regulation, and bidirectional power flow. For these purposes, a fully digital controller is designed and implemented using a TMS320F240 digital signal processor. In addition, a novel low-cost AC capacitor is also presented. This type of capacitor requires two DC capacitors and two diodes, enabling low-cost and compact manufacturing. Consequently, the complete voltage regulator system, which is mainly suitable for an uninterruptible power supply as well as reactive or nonlinear loads, can be constructed compactly and inexpensively. Experimental results are presented to verify the feasibility of the proposed voltage regulator system.