A modified control approach for power factor correction in AC/DC boost converter

Reactive power is one of the most significant ways that electricity is lost when it travels along power lines, resulting in the use of larger equipment on the distribution system. There is also a corresponding increase in the amount of greenhouse gases that get released into the atmosphere. The solution to these problems lies in power factor correction (PFC) where in less reactive power will be drawn from the system thus reducing energy wastage. It also has an added advantage of increasing the electrical system´s branch capacity. The voltage loop in control circuit of the conventional system has low bandwidth in order to mitigate 3rd harmonic distortion in the input current thus causing high overshoots and undershoots in output voltage. By implementing an interleaved boost converter & applying a discrete control method it was possible to achieve an improved performance, but the problem with it was that the modeling of control circuit was very complex. To eliminate these drawbacks a new control strategy has been presented in order to further improve the power factor. This modified controller is much simpler and gives an improved power factor. In this paper computer simulations of the different control strategies has been realized and a comparison between them has been done.