Investigation on 24-Pulse Diode Rectifier for More Electric Aircrafts

The market for the aviation industry is expected to experience extraordinary development over the years to come. As an immediate result, regulating agencies and airlines express grave concerns about the environment and the economy. Plenty of effort has been put into investigating more electric aircraft (MEA) to control and lower emissions while maintaining profitability. The aviation industry uses multi-pulse ac/dc rectifiers (MPRs) because of their ruggedness, cost, reliability, maintenance-free, and efficient operation. This work demonstrates a circuit to lower the harmonics at the ac mains of a 12-pulse extended-delta auto-transformer-based diode bridge rectifier (DBR). In the proposed circuit design, to increase the pulse number of a standard 12-pulse auto-transformer rectifier (12PAR) to 24PAR, a pulse multiplication circuit at the de side of the 12-pulse DBR is proposed. The pulse multiplication circuit has two diodes with lesser conduction losses and two tapped inter-phase reactors as well as easier to design than traditional pulse multiplication circuits because it doesn't need a zero-sequence blocking trans-former. Furthermore, the proposed circuit configuration on the ac side makes the source current very close to the sinusoidal wave. The proposed configuration is investigated and simulated in MATLAB/Simulink, and experimental results are presented to validate the simulation results. These results demonstrate that the power quality parameters in the input ac line current have significantly improved, sufficient to satisfy the DO-160G standards for aircraft applications.