Abstract
In this paper, we propose a new AC-DC converter control method to comply with harmonics regulation(IEC 61000-3) effective for the inverter system of an air conditioner whose power consumption is less than 2,500W. There are many different ways of AC-DC converter control, but this paper focuses on the converter control method that is adopting an input reactor with low cost silicon steel core to strengthen cost competitiveness of the manufacturer. The proposed control method controls input current every half cycle of the line frequency to get unit power factor and at the same time to reduce switching loss of devices and acoustic noise from reactor. This kind of converter is known as a Partial Switching Converter(PSC). In this study, theoretical analysis of the PSC has been performed using Matlab/Simulink while a 16-bit micro-processor based converter has been used to perform the experimental analysis. In the theoretical analysis, electrical circuit models and equations of the PSC are derived and simulated. In the experiments, micro-processor controls input current to keep the power factor above 0.95 by reducing the phase difference between input voltage and current and at the same time to maintain a reference DC-link voltage against voltage drop which depends on DC-link load. Therefore it becomes possible to comply with harmonic regulations while the power factor is maximized by optimizing the time of current flow through the input reactor for every half cycle of line frequency.
