Education of Control and Over-Current Protection Strategy for Active Three-Phase Rectifiers

Understanding rectifiers and modern control is extremely important for new graduates to know entering the electrical field. Graduate and undergraduate students were able to work together to help understand control and overcurrent protection for active three-phase rectifiers. Rectifiers are used to generate DC power from an AC source. For rectification of low-voltage, high-current power, rectifiers with low forward voltage drop are needed. As such, power MOSFETs are preferred to diodes. The proposed circuit design enables low forward voltage drop across the rectifiers by using power MOSFETs while providing protection strategy using sensor resistances. The circuit is also designed to be general for power scalability and tunable to fit device specifications for different power requirements. As a senior design project, students were able to create a full wave rectifier of a single-phase demonstrating use of mosfets. The requirements were based on creating a DC supply from one leg of a three-phase power system from an aircraft engine.