An active power factor correction technique for three-phase diode rectifiers

A novel active power factor correction method for power supplies with three-phase front-end diode rectifiers is proposed and analyzed. The implementation of this method requires the use of an additional single-switch boost chopper. The combined front-end converter draws sinusoidal AC currents from the AC source with nearly unity input power factor while operating at a fixed switching frequency. It is shown that when the active input power factor correction stage is also used to regulate the converter DC bus voltage, the converter performance can improve substantially in comparison with the conventional three-phase AC to DC converters. These improvements include component count reduction, simplified input synchronization logic requirements, and smaller reactive components. Selected theoretical results are verified experimentally