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In this paper, the analysis and the design of a high-efficiency power electronic conversion system for offshore wind applications are presented. This system is composed of a 6-phase AC–DC converter based on the SiC power semiconductors, to be used to control the achievable power from the wind turbine electrical generator. Thanks to the phase redundancy, the proposed boost rectifier is suitable for applications where reliability and fault tolerance capability are the main targets. To select the appropriate power semiconductor devices, voltage and current ratings have to be determined. After that, the power loss equations are derived in order to evaluate the conversion efficiency. To design the appropriate DC-bus capacitor configuration, an analytical investigation is carried out by estimating the DC-bus RMS current and the voltage ripple. Finally, the thermal sizing of the system is calculated to identify a suitable heatsink. To validate the proposed analysis, the analytical results are compared to simulation ones using the Plexim/PLECS tool in the MATLAB/Simulink environment. For further validation, a prototype of the converter is built and the experimental results are carried out. The results demonstrate that the peak efficiency of the 6-phase boost rectifier can reach 98% at 100 kHz switching frequency.

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