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Three-Level Phase-Shift ZVS-PWM DC-DC Converter with High Frequency

Transformer for High Performance Arc Welding Machines

Conference Paper · March 2010

DOI: 10.1109/APEC.2010.5433344 · Source: IEEE Xplore

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 8th International Conference on Power Electronics - ECCE Asia
[WeG4-2] May 30-June 3, 2011, The Shilla Jeju, Korea

DC-DC Converter with Three-Phase Power Factor

Correction for Arc Welder
Khairy Sayed(1), Keiki Morimoto(2), Soon-Kurl Kwon(3), Katsumi Nishida(4), Mutsuo Nakaoka(5)
(1)
Sohag University, Sohag, Egypt
(2)
Daihen Corporation, Osaka, Japan
(3)
Kyungnam University, Masn, South Korea
(4)
Ube National College of Technology, Ube, Japan
(5)
Kyungnam University, South Korea/Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi, Japan

Abstract— This paper presents a PWM converter, which enables best performance in terms of shaping the input currents and
to maintain high power-factor of arc welding power supply and presenting reverse energy flow capability [9]. However, as
to suppress input current harmonics. The main function of this shown in Fig. 1, it is necessary to use IGBTs instead of
system is to maintain unity power-factor by controlling input MOSFETs because of the high bus voltage processed by the
current to be sinusoidal, and to generate stable DC output
boost-type rectifier. To improve the efficiency of the six-
voltage through half-bridge inverter and output rectifier. The
proposed converter has high power factor, low harmonic switch boost rectifiers, several soft-switching schemes and
distortion, and tight output regulations. A control scheme is lossless snubbers have been presented [10]. Further
employed to reduce the switching and rectification losses. The improvements in switching and conduction losses have also
modeling and simulation analysis are performed to evaluate the been developed by applying special modulation schemes that
performance characteristics. The proposed converter meets the optimize the conduction of the power switches within the line
IEC 61000-3-2 regulations with near-unity power factor and high period [12].
efficiency. Power Factor Correction (PFC) allows power distribution
to operate at its maximum efficiency. There are two types of
I- INTRODUCTION PFC, Active PFC and Passive PFC. All of our power supplies
Nowadays, a number of power-factor-correction circuits are either Active PFC Power Supplies or Passive PFC Power
have been developed in order to meet the requirements for Supplies. The preferable type of PFC is Active Power Factor
international standards such as IEC 555-2, IEEE 519, and IEC Correction (Active PFC) since it provides more efficient
61000-3-2. There are two objectives for developing research power frequency. Because Active PFC uses a circuit to correct
on PFC circuits used for high-power Arc welding power factor, Active PFC is able to generate a theoretical
applications. The first reason is to improve power quality, power factor of over 95%. Active Power Factor Correction
since the harmonic current must be limited within the strict also markedly diminishes total harmonics, automatically
bounds established by standards. Otherwise, the manufacturer corrects for AC input voltage, and is capable of a full range of
of front-end converters would not be able to promote a input voltage. Since Active PFC is the more complex method
competitive product in the market. The second reason for of Power Factor Correction, it is more expensive to produce
researching PFC is cost reduction. Although customers an Active PFC power supply.
require PFC, they are not willing to pay more for such a
function. As a result, a low-cost PFC with good performance
indices has become an important issue to arc welding power
supply manufacturers. PFC can reduce the harmonics in the
line current, increase the efficiency and capacity of power
systems, and reduce customer's utility bills. The continuous
development of electronic loads on power distribution
systems has led to inefficient and unsafe conditions due to the
typically poor power factor of electronic power conversion
equipment. Waveform distortion and the overheating of
transformers and neutral conductors in three-phase systems
are just a few of the effects. Consequently, economic and Fig. 1 Three-phase boost rectifier with one-switch PFC circuit
safety concerns along the integrity of power distribution
systems have created an acute interest in power factor The most common type of PFC is Passive Power Factor
correction (PFC) strategies. Correction (Passive PFC). Passive PFC uses a capacitive filter
When choosing a strategy for PFC, it is essential to recognize at the AC input to correct poor power factor. Passive PFC
that the poor power factor occurring in electronic power may be affected when environmental vibration occurs. Passive
conversion equipment is entirely different from the traditional PFC requires that the AC input voltage be set manually.
poor power factor seen with inductive motor loads, and Passive PFC also does not use the full energy potential of the
requires a different corrective approach. AC line. An active power factor correction method for power
There are many methods that can be used to improve power supplies with three-phase front-end diode rectifiers (Fig. 1)
quality in high-power applications. Among the three-phase was proposed and analyzed [1]. Implementation of this
rectifiers, the six-switch boost topology is able to achieve the

978-1-61284-957-7/11/$26.00 ©2011 IEEE

method requires the use of an additional single switch boost mode, such as: fixed frequency, simplicity of control, low
chopper. cost, high power factor, and relatively low harmonic
distortion. High amplitude of the input current ripple increases
Harmonics are usually contained in the input current; to the size and volume of the input EM1 filter. To overcome this
improve it two methods are applied. One is by using passive drawback, two boost rectifiers that are paralleled and
circuits and the other is by active shaping of the input line interleaved are used. The amplitude of input current ripple is
current. The first method utilizes inductors and capacitors drastically reduced and its effective frequency is increased as
connected as filters for the undesirable harmonic signals. The well. As a consequence, the size and volume of the input EM1
significant disadvantages of this method are higher cost, filter can be reduced.
bigger size of components needed, greater losses and the II OPERATION PINCIPLE
significant dependence of the output voltage on the power A- Circuit Configuration
drawn by the load. The second method uses electronic circuit The proposed three-phase ac to dc converter (Fig. 1),
to shape the input current to follow a sinusoidal waveform at consists of two main power conversion stages. The stage is a
near unity power factor. The usual circuit for this application three-phase ac to dc rectifier consisting of an input filter, a
is the step-up converter. In this application the converter is boost inductor; a three-phase diode rectifier, an active power
controlled to force the input current to the rectifier to be in factor correction stage, and a dc link filter capacitor. The
phase with the input voltage. The process involves the second stage can be modeled as any type of load
generation of the desired current signal, which is used as a requiring a regulated or unregulated dc bus such as general
reference. This signal is compared to the actual measured purpose single-phase or three-phase inverters or dc-dc
current in order to generate the control signal that will converters with high of the input frequency isolation.
determine the switching duty cycle applied to the gate of the This paper investigates simple and low-cost solutions for the
electronic switch. There are different ways to implement the three-phase PFC used in three phase power supply. The
switch mode control of the step-up converter. These are objective is to develop a power converter with high PF, to
enumerated as follows; constant frequency control, constant investigate techniques and circuits for PFC high power
tolerance band control, variable tolerance band control and applications that achieve the following features: simple,
discontinuous current control. While each method has an reduced size and reduced cost, while maintaining reasonable
advantage and disadvantage the common advantage of these performance. This converter is capable of drawing a high-
methods over the passive circuit is their ability to maintain the quality ac line current waveform and pure dc output voltage
input current at an almost sinusoidal waveform at near unity without a significant low-frequency ripple. The proposed
power factor. Other advantages are the reduced component inverter arc welding machine is composed of 3 phase rectifier,
size for filtering and the ability to maintain the output even at half bridge inverter, output side rectifier, reactor and capacitor
large variations of the input voltage. The disadvantage of as shown in Fig. 1. The single-switch and the two switch
these methods is the reduced efficiency due to additional DCM three-phase boost topology, the boost inductors operate
losses in the converter and the complexity of designing the in DCM to achieve automatic input current shaping. The
active shaping control circuit. harmonic injection method was used in the single-switch
A Design Approach of a three-phase single-switch DCM boost rectifier to increase the output power level
discontinuous inductor current mode boost rectifier was without increasing the bus voltage beyond practical levels.
presented in [2], a procedure is introduced which can be
applied in a simple way for determining the component The buck rectifier has some advantages over the six-switch
stresses in a three-phase single-switch DICM boost rectifier boost rectifier, such as the step-down voltage capability,
system. The remaining circuits in Fig. 2 represent potential inherent control of the inrush, short-circuit protection, current,
circuit designs when bi-directional power flow is not required and low bus capacitance. On the other hand, the major
or when the power flow to the ac supply has a low per-unit disadvantages of the buck rectifiers, as compared to the boost
rating. The single switch topology, Fig. 2(b), is very low cost topologies, are the pulsating input currents and the conduction
and can achieve low line-current distortion when loss caused by several voltage drops in the path of the
discontinuous inductor currents are used together with a high inductor current. For very high-power applications, low-
frequency AC supply filter. This discontinuous conduction frequency PFC topologies have been used as low-cost front-
operation is not very suitable for many high power end PFC circuits. When the size is not a requirement, the use
applications. The 2-switch boost circuit in Fig. 2(c) can be of low-frequency rectifiers, will be suitable. A low-frequency
used to lower the switching frequency or to lower the high rectifier is the three-phase, three-level boost topology shown
frequency ripple in the dc-link inductors; the switches are also in Fig. 3(a). For this application, the three- level rectifier
exposed only to one half the dc-rail voltage [3]. In [3] a new operates at low frequency, and the power switches shape the
3-phase PWM boost rectifier topologies that use a input currents by conducting during short intervals within the
combination of a 3-phase bidirectional switch 2 dc-link line period. Although the total harmonic distortion (THD) of
inductors and an asymmetrical half bridge to shape the 3- the input current is relatively low at heavy load, it drastically
phase line currents to obtain unity PF and a line current THD increases as the output power decreases [19]. The third-
level below 5%, . harmonic injection method is also an option for high-power
A Parallel three-phase single-switch DCM boost rectifier PFC applications [20], as illustrated in Fig. 2(b). The switches
with ZCT was proposed in [4]. Boost converters have several are operated at high frequency in order to control the currents
advantages when operated in the discontinuous conduction through the DC-side inductors. However, despite the high-

2
frequency operation of the power switches, the series network
must be tuned around the third harmonic of the line frequency
to provide low THD for the input current. As a result, the size
of the converter is large because of the low series resonant
frequency.

Rectifiers are nonlinear in load, and generate harmonic

currents into the ac power source. The nonlinear operation of
the diode rectifiers causes distortion in the input current. The
non-sinusoidal shape of the input current drawn by the
rectifiers has a bad effect on the electronic equipment and on
the power distribution network. The distorted input current
produces harmonic currents of the utility equipment, such as
generators, power transformers, result in heating in the
transformer winding and increasing volt-ampere ratings. The
discontinuous conduction of the current in the diode bridge
rectifier increasing the total harmonic distortion (THD) in the Fig 4 Rectifier diodes currents
input lines and can lead to malfunctioning of the electronic
equipment. The recommended one uses practice, IEEE-519
and IEC 1000-3 have evolved to maintain utility power
quality at acceptable levels.
B- Simulation Results
The proposed topology has been studied using PSIM
simulation. The input voltage and current waveforms are
shown in Fig. 2. The switch current and output capacitor
current are shown in Fig. 3. The rectifier diodes currents are
shown in Fig. 4. The DC output voltage is shown in Fig. 5. the
FFT analysis is done using PSIM as in Fig. 6. the third and
fifth harmonic appears but it is a small value.

Fig 5 DC output voltage

Fig 2. Input voltage and current

Fig 6 FFT of input current Ia

III. TWO-SWITCH THREE-LEVEL DCM BOOST

RECTIFIER
A. Circuit Description
A similar version of the topology discussed hereafter, using
variable-frequency control, has been previously presented
[30]. The two-switch three-phase rectifier is shown in Fig. 3.
The three-level structure is comprised of the switches S1 and
S2 and diodes D1 and D2. The capacitors C1 and C2 share the
Fig. 3 IGBT and output capacitor current
total bus voltage. The AC capacitors Ca, Cb, and Cc eliminate

3
the neutral point connection of the power system, thus Fig. 9 shows the simulation results obtained from a circuit that
preventing any zero-sequence-order harmonic (3rd, 9th, 15th, supplies a total power of 6kW at 170V line-to-neutral input
etc…) from circulating in the input lines. The advantage of voltage. The capacitance C1 was set to 400µF and
the three-level structure is that the voltage applied across the
power switches is half of the total bus voltage, which enables
the use of devices with lower voltage ratings. As shown in
Fig. 7, a freewheeling diode can be used to reduce the
conduction loss in the buck rectifier.

B. Control Strategy and Voltage Balance Across the Bus

Capacitors
Instead of connecting a single load across the positive and
negative DC rails, the load can be split between the output
capacitors. Although this approach to connecting the output
load is possible, if the converter is not properly controlled,
any difference between the DC currents circulating through
the split output loads results in an offset in the voltages across
the AC capacitors, as well as in an imbalance of the voltages
across C1 and C2. Fortunately, this voltage imbalance across Fig. 8 Control block diagram of PWM converter
the bus capacitors can be somewhat compensated for by
properly controlling S1 and S2. One possible scheme for
controlling the voltage imbalance across C1 and C2 is
presented in Fig. 8. As can be seen, S1 is used to control the
voltage across C2, whereas S2 is used to control the voltage
across C1. Both voltage controllers in Fig. 7 use the same
voltage reference, which is Vbus/2.

Fig. 9. Control of voltages across C1 and C2: (a) control scheme and (b)
simulation results.

Fig. 7 Three-phase boost rectifier with two-switch three-level third harmonic C2 to 500µF. The control objective is to regulate the average
injection PFC circuit
voltages across C1 and C2 to 400V.
The flexibility of using Q1 to control V2 and Q2 to control V1
Fig. 8 shows control block diagram of PWM converter, in enables the use of the two-switch three-level DCM boost
which there are two control loops. One is output voltage rectifier, as illustrated in Fig. 8. Since the voltages across C1
controller to maintain constant DC output voltage, and the and C2 can be individually controlled, conventional DC/DC
other is current controller to make input current be sinusoidal. converters usually designed to operate from a 400V bus can
As can be verified in Fig. 8, the voltages across C1 and C2 be connected across the output capacitors. Any duty cycle
are controlled to the targeted value, despite the imbalance in mismatch in the switches of the three-level DC/DC converter
the split load and the mismatch between C1 and C2. It is causes a voltage imbalance across C1 and C2. This voltage
important to mention, however, that there is no means of imbalance, however, can be mitigated by the modulation
regulating both voltages under severe load imbalance. For scheme described in Fig. 8.
instance, suppose that C2 is suddenly disconnected from the
rectifier. In this case, the control signal that generates the duty IV. CONCLUSION
cycle for Q1 is driven to zero. However, Q2 is still able to This paper discussed the using the single-switch DCM
control the voltage across C1 to 400V. Therefore, there is still boost rectifier as a PFC stage for applications in arc welding
current flowing through capacitor C2 during the turn-off stage power supply. Detailed analyses and simplified design
of Q2. Since C2 has been disconnected, it is no longer guidelines were presented. The harmonic injection method
possible to assure the charge balance in C2, and the converter demonstrated improvements in the quality of the currents
will not operate properly. Consequently, under a situation of drained from the power source. As a benefit of the harmonic
extreme imbalance, such as the disconnection of one of the injection technique, it is possible to extract more power from
output loads, the rectifier must be shut down.

4
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