Fully controlled 5-phase, 10-pulse, line commutated rectifier

Abstract

The development and production of multiphase machines either generators or motors, specially five-phase, offers improved performance compared to three-phase counterpart. Five phase generators could generate power in applications such as, but not limited to, wind power generation, electric vehicles, aerospace, and oil and gas. The five-phase generator output requires converter system such as ac-dc converters. In this paper, a fully controlled 10-pulse line commutated rectifier, suitable to be engaged with wind energy applications, fed from five-phase source is introduced. A shunt active power filter (APF) is used to improve power factor and supply current total harmonic distortion (THD). Compared to three-phase converters, 6-pulse or 12-pulse rectifiers, the 10-pulse rectifier engaged with 5-phase source alleviate their drawbacks such as high dc ripples and no need for electric gear or phase shifting transformer. MATLAB/SIMULINK platform is used as a simulation tool to investigate the performance of the proposed rectifier. ª 2015 Production and hosting by Elsevier B.V. on behalf of Faculty of Engineering, Alexandria University. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/).

Five-Phase Line Commutated Rectifiers

“…where j represents phases a, b, c, d, and e, respectively, and k equals 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4, respectively. The five-phase source has two line voltages (adjacent and nonadjacent) [3,5]. The line voltages can be calculated using phasor diagram shown in Figure 1.…”

“…The angle between the fundamental input current and fundamental input phase voltage, ϕ, is called the displacement angle. The displacement factor is defined as [3,5,16].…”

“…In all cases, the generator output voltage should be rectified. Owing to the numerous advantages when compared to its three-phase counterpart such as high fault-tolerant capability, five-phase direct-drive permanent magnet generators are a key area of focus in power generation with renewable and wind energy systems [2][3][4][5][6]. Hence, the generator output requires a converter, such as an AC-DC rectifier, to match load requirements.…”

“…To address such problems, power factor control rectifiers, which operate at a high switching frequency, such as pulse-width modulated (PWM) rectifiers are used where the filter size for PWM rectifiers is smaller owing to the higher switching frequencies [9,11,12]. However, one of the main drawbacks of using PWM rectifiers is the limitation of the switch current and voltage, which restricts the use of such rectifiers in high-power-scale applications [3,5,13,14].…”

“…Part 'e' in Figure 5 shows that supply current is a quasi-square wave where input current comprises 2π/5 alternating polarity blocks, with each phase displaced to others by 2π/5. The input phase current can be expressed as [5,8,11,15].…”