Determination of the Voltage Coefficients of the Six-Switch AC/AC Converter Based on Static Utilization Factor

Abstract

The six-switch AC/AC converter (SSC) is a suitable replacement of the back-to-back converter (B2B) for low-voltage and low-power usages. Its benefits include an increase in reliability due to its reduced number of switches, at cost of an increased DC bus voltage. An important step of the SSC implementation is the design of the DC voltage distribution ratio across the three DC bus sections in this converter, although it is not clear in the literature the freedom for setting these values, denominated voltage coefficients, nor the way to improve the DC bus utilization with fixed offset values. This paper presents some guidelines to establish DC bus voltage coefficients and introduces a new method to improve the DC bus utilization. Simulation results show that this new method has similar performance compared to the most used method in literature, and allows a reduction of the needed DC bus voltage according to the static voltage utilization factor.