Abstract
Due to the growing application of power electronics loads, a significant amount of voltage and current harmonics are injected into the power system and the quality of electric power is degraded as a result. To address this issue, various industry standards, such as IEEE 519-1992, IEC 61000-3-2 are introduced to regulate the voltage and current harmonic distortions. For motor drives applications, more and more active front-end converters have been adopted to replace the conventional diode rectifier front-ends to meet these requirements. In addition to its unity power factor operation, the active front-end converter also has the advantage of bi-directional power flow to allow energy regeneration from the DC side to the unity. In this thesis, an active front-end converter prototype is designed and implemented in the laboratory. A closed-loop control method is developed and verified using this prototype. A dynamic model of the active front-end converter is also developed to identity its transient and steady state behavior. Laboratory test results are presented to validate the performance of the control design and the accuracy of the dynamic modeling.