A novel three-phase to three-phase AC/AC converter using six IGBTs

Recently, using reduced-switch-count converters in power electronic systems have growing trend due to the numerous advantages such as low cost, low weight and volume, and high reliability offered by them. In this paper, a new reduced-switch-count converter topology is proposed as a three-phase to three-phase AC/AC converter. It uses only six active switches and six diodes and has the lowest number of active switches among three-phase to three-phase AC/AC converters proposed hitherto in the literature. This converter offers sinusoidal input and output, unity power factor and more importantly, low manufacturing cost. The modulation scheme of the novel converter is developed and the control methods for rectifier and inverter parts of proposed converter are presented. Furthermore, analysis of sizing of the DC link capacitors is performed and capacitor sizes are chosen so as to minimize the voltage ripple of the DC link. The theoretical knowledge is corroborated by simulation results. The analysis and simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed converter.