1278 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO.

3, MAY 2008

Unity Power Factor Isolated Three-Phase Rectifier

With Split DC-Bus Based on the Scott Transformer
Alceu André Badin, Student Member, IEEE, and Ivo Barbi, Senior Member, IEEE

Abstract—In this work, the three-phase rectifier with a new con-

nection is presented. The use of the Scott transformer makes a
split dc-bus voltage possible and the rectifier operates with unity
power factor. Using only two active switches, the rectifier is able
to generate symmetrical currents in the line and a balanced split
dc-bus output voltage, which is necessary in several applications.
Pulse width modulation and instantaneous average current control
are used. There are two voltage controls that regulate the output
voltage and the split dc-bus voltage. Complete simulation results
under closed loop operation are given, as well as results of an ex-
perimental setup.
Index Terms—AC–DC converters, power factor corrector (PFC)
converters, power supplies, pulse width modulated (PWM), split
dc-bus voltage, three-phase rectifier.

I. INTRODUCTION

I N recent years, the growth in the use of electrical equipment

has resulted in more stringent international standards and
utility requirements to ensure that the line current harmonic con-
Fig. 1. Unity power factor isolated three-phase rectifier parallel connection.

tent of the equipment connected to the ac mains is limited [1]. If
such standards did not exist, then sensitive electrical equipment
connected to the mains would be damaged as a result of a dis-
torted mains voltage. Three-phase ac–dc converters connected
to the mains have the potential of injecting current harmonics
into the mains that may cause voltage distortion. These har-
monics can be significantly reduced if the input power factor is
corrected by shaping the input current in each of the three phases
so that it is sinusoidal and in phase with the phase voltage. Due
to this fact, switch-mode rectifiers for power factor correction
have gained considerable attention. Other reasons for the use of
power factor corrector (PFC) rectifiers are their adaptability to
different line voltages and the fact that they pre-regulate the dc
output voltage, which may be supplying a dc–dc converter.
The analysis of high power factor three-phase rectifiers and
new control techniques are presented in [2]–[9]. These rectifiers
have three or more active switches.
In [10] a three-phase switch-mode rectifier employing three
single-phase boost PFC circuits with direct output coupling is
presented. This topology uses three power switches but it has a
high component count and is not isolated.
In [11], a three-phase PFC scheme is proposed using two
single-phase PFC modules. The two-phase system is produced
by means of a 0.14-pu-rated autotransformer connected to the
three-phase input. However, this topology is not isolated.
Manuscript received July 4, 2006; revised August 28, 2007. Recommended
for publication by Associate Editor J. Kolar.
The authors are with the Power Electronics Institute, Federal University of
Santa Catarina, Florianopolis 88040-970, Brazil (e-mail: alceu@inep.ufsc.br).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPEL.2008.920878
0885-8993/$25.00 © 2008 IEEE
In addition to unity power factor, safety and robustness are
also important for medium and high power applications. There-
fore, low frequency isolation is used. Isolated rectifiers have
been widely used in the electrochemical and petrochemical in-
dustries.
Since regulated output voltage is not required, a number of
methods have been proposed to lower the harmonics gener-
ated by diode rectifier-type utility interfaces [12]–[14]. One
approach is to use a conventional 12-pulse converter which
requires two six-pulse converters connected through isolation
transformers.
The three-phase rectifier based on the Scott Transformer
(Fig. 1) was proposed in [15] and its practical aspects were
analyzed in [16]. The Scott transformer provides galvanic iso-
lation and sine and cosine secondary voltage waveforms to the
high power factor rectifiers, resulting in a perfectly regulated
dc output voltage.
In this paper, an unity power factor three-phase rectifier with
a split dc-bus based on the Scott transformer is presented. The
proposed topology is shown in the Fig. 2. This rectifier has a split
dc-bus and the voltages across the switches are /2. The con-
trol method employed to control the currents of the two boost
inductors, and , is instantaneous average current control.
Each rectifier presents an independent current loop with an in-
dividual reference current, generating sinusoidal secondary cur-
rents in phase with their respective secondary voltages.
II. STEADY-STATE ANALYSIS
The Scott connection is realized by two single phase trans-
formers, and . The primary windings are fed by two dif-
BADIN AND BARBI: UNITY POWER FACTOR ISOLATED THREE-PHASE RECTIFIER 1279

Fig. 2. Unity power factor isolated three-phase rectifier with a new series-con-
nection technique.

Fig. 4. Three-phase rectifier equivalent circuit.

The instantaneous average duty cycles of the switches are

(3)

(4)

The purpose of using a boost PFC is to correct the power

factor of the structure by forcing the inductor current to follow
the shape of the rectified secondary voltage. The boost inductor
currents are, therefore, images of the rectified secondary volt-
ages of (1) and (2)

Fig. 3. (a) Scott connection of the single phase transformers and (b) phasor
diagram of the transformer using the Scott connection. (5)
(6)

ferent voltages, and , that are generated from a where is the peak value of the boost inductor current.
symmetrical three-phase system and . The The current through the switch of a boost converter is the cur-
connection is presented in Fig. 3(a). and rep- rent through the boost inductor multiplied by the duty cycle. In
resent a two phase voltage system, with a phase angle 90 be- the same manner, the current through the boost diode is the cur-
tween them. The phasor diagram is presented in Fig. 3(b). rent through the boost inductor multiplied by the complemen-
In the theoretical study of the unity power factor isolated tary duty cycle. Therefore, the currents through the boost diodes
three-phase rectifier, only the secondary circuitry will be taken are defined as
into account. Therefore, the secondary windings of the Scott
transformer are considered to be ideal ac power sources. The (7)
full-bridge diode rectifiers were substituted by power sources (8)
that represent the rectified secondary voltages and
. The topology of Fig. 2 can be reduced to the circuit Substituting (3)–(6) into (7) and (8) yields
of Fig. 4.
The secondary voltages of the Scott transformer are sine and
cosine waveforms. Therefore, the rectified voltages at the inputs (9)
of the boost converters are
(10)

(1) Considering a balanced load, the resulting equivalent circuit

(2) can be seen in Fig. 5.
1280 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO. 3, MAY 2008

Fig. 5. Equivalent circuit of the output filter.

From the equations of nodes and , the following differ-

ential equations are obtained:

(11)

(12)

Solving the differential equations yields (13) and (14), shown at

the bottom of the page. Fig. 6. Output voltages (a) C =C and (b) C >C .
The total output voltage, , is defined as the sum of the
capacitor voltages of the output filters:
Input voltage harmonics can also cause ripple in the output
(15)
voltage. In this case, the secondary voltages of the Scott trans-
former are not sine and cosine waveforms.
Substituting (13) and (14) into (15) and considering
, we obtain
III. CONTROL STRATEGY
(16) Each boost PFC presents its own current control. The external
voltage loop is shared by both boost PFCs in order to guarantee
The high frequency components of current were discarded by equal power distribution between them. A second voltage loop
considering only the instantaneous average values of the boost acts to guarantee the balance of the split dc-bus voltage. A com-
diode currents. Even so, ideally, the high frequency components plete block diagram of the control loops can be seen in Fig. 7.
of the current would flow through the output capacitor, leaving The common voltage control loop equally distributes the
the dc component free to flow through the load, resulting in a power between the boost PFCs when a balanced load is present.
constant voltage output [Fig. 6(a)]. Furthermore, it has a fast dynamic response to load variations.
If the capacitances of and are different, ripple According to (16), output voltage is constant and does
voltage will be present in voltage . Therefore, identical not present low frequency ripple. However, the dynamic limit
capacitors should be used in order to avoid output ripple. In the of the shared voltage control loop is different from that of the
same manner, if nonidentical or nonlinear loads are connected single-phase boost PFC converter. This is true for a balanced
to the boost rectifiers, low frequency ripple will exist in the power supply without voltage harmonics and for a linear load
output voltage . connected to the output.

(13)

(14)
BADIN AND BARBI: UNITY POWER FACTOR ISOLATED THREE-PHASE RECTIFIER 1281

Fig. 7. Complete block diagram of the control loops.

A load without a neutral point can be connected to the output

of the three-phase rectifier. In this case, the second voltage con- Fig. 8. Open-Loop Bode plot of the current controlled system.
trol loop will balance the voltage across capacitors and
.
In the case of an imbalance in the mains, the second voltage TABLE I
DESIGN SPECIFICATIONS
loop balances the voltage at the dc bus. In this case, the input
currents are unbalanced and present low harmonic distortion.
Where is the reference voltage, and are the
reference currents, is the voltage compensator common
to both boost PFCs, is the voltage compensator of the
balanced split dc-bus, and are the current com-
pensators, and are the shunt resistances,
and are the transfer functions of the
plant, and , are the output voltages of each boost PFC, where and are the gain, pole and zero of the current
and is the output voltage. compensator.
The reference currents ( and ) are defined by
A. Current Loop
(19)
Instantaneous average current control is one of the most (20)
widely methods used to correct the power factor of rectifiers.
This technique consists of monitoring and controlling the boost where is the scaling factor of the input voltage.
inductor current by means of high frequency switching, so that Fig. 8 shows the open loop transfer function step response
current follows a sinusoidal reference with minimum error. using the design specifications of Table I and the compensator
The transfer functions of the converter and parameters presented in Table II. The crossover frequency is
were obtained from Fig. 5 and from [11], and can be seen in approximately 3 kHz.

(17) B. Voltage Loops

To control the voltage, two voltage control loops are used.
The current controller transfer function is defined by A common voltage loop is used to provide each current loop
with the exact same value with which to generate their reference
currents. A second voltage control loop is added to the common
(18)
voltage loop and it is applied to only one of the boost PFCs. The
1282 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO. 3, MAY 2008

TABLE II The voltage controller transfer function for the second voltage
CURRENT CONTROLLER PARAMETERS loop is defined by

(22)

where and are the gain, pole and zero of the voltage
compensator.
To obtain the transfer function of the shared control loop
, we consider that the parameters of the boost con-
verters are identical. In other words, and are
identically and mutually independent. This assumption is pos-
sible due to the presence of a neutral point at the load which
decouples the two boost converters and make their interaction
weak. Since the systems are in series, transfer function
is given by

(23)

where

(24)

From (23) and (24), (25) is obtained, which represents

transfer function

Fig. 9. Voltage loop block diagram.

(25)
second loop guarantees the balance of the split dc-bus voltage.
A block diagram of the voltage loops can be seen in Fig. 9.
The current loop is considered to be much faster than the The voltage controller transfer function of the plant for the
voltage loop and, therefore, its closed-loop transfer function common voltage loop is defined by
can be simplified and represented as the current sensor conduc-
tance 1/ . This simplification does not compromise the dy- (26)
namics of the voltage loop because the simplified and complete
closed-loop transfer functions of the current loop are identical
at the frequency range of the voltage loop. where and are the gain, pole and zero of the
The transfer function of the plant for the second voltage loop voltage compensator.
was obtained from the model of Fig. 5 and can be seen in (21). Fig. 10 shows the Bode plot using the voltage compensator
The equivalent series resistance ( ) of the output capacitor parameters presented in Table III and the design spec-
was taken into account. However, this resistance is insignificant ifications of Table I. The crossover frequency is approximately
in most cases and can be ignored 17 Hz.
The voltage compensator for the common voltage loop used
the same parameters as those presented in Table III, except that
the static gain and crossover frequency were 1500 and 70 Hz,
respectively (see Table IV).

IV. SIMULATION RESULTS

The results of three simulations are presented to verify the
(21) study until this point. The first simulation aims to verify the
performance of the current loop.
BADIN AND BARBI: UNITY POWER FACTOR ISOLATED THREE-PHASE RECTIFIER 1283

Fig. 11. Line currents i (t); i (t) and i (t).

Fig. 10. Open-loop Bode plot of the voltage controlled system.

Fig. 12. Output voltage v (t); v (t) and v (t)=2.

TABLE III
VOLTAGE CONTROLLER PARAMETERS FOR SECOND VOLTAGE LOOP

TABLE IV
COMPONENT VALUES OF THE RECTIFIER

Fig. 13. Line currents after a 50% reduction (12 kW to 6 kW) and a 50% in-
crease (6 kW to 12 kW) in the load.

The second simulation aims to verify the performance of the

control loops when the rectifier suffers load variations from
100% of the rated load (12 kW) to 50% (6 kW) and from 50%
(6 kW) to 100% (12 kW). The results for the line currents can
be seen in Fig. 13.
Fig. 11 shows line currents and . Fig. 12 The third simulation verifies the voltage loop when the recti-
shows the output voltage of each boost PFC, and , fier suffers a load unbalance in relation to the split dc-bus. Ini-
and output voltage . tially each boost converter processes 3 kW. At 60 ms one of the
1284 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO. 3, MAY 2008

Fig. 14. Voltages v (t) and v (t) after a 50% increase in one of the loads,
resulting in a load imbalance.

Fig. 16. Phase voltage v (t) and current i (t) (10 A/division and 5 ms/divi-
sion).

Fig. 15. Photograph of the laboratory prototype. Dimensions are

2 2
360 mm 250 mm 120 mm.

rectifiers suffers a load variation and starts processing 6 kW.

The result can be seen in Fig. 14. Fig. 17. Normalized line current harmonics (phase A).

V. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS
A laboratory prototype of the isolated three-phase rectifier
based on the Scott transformer with a split dc-bus was imple-
mented to prove the theoretical studies. Both of the PFC mod-
ules are controlled by Unitrode UC3854B, [17], [18]. The de-
sign specifications of the prototype can be seen in Table I.
The reference currents are obtained by scaling the measured
rectified secondary voltages of the Scott transformer. These are
the references of the current controller, which determines the
shape of the boost inductor currents. The inductor currents are
measured by Hall sensors.
Fig. 15 presents a photograph of the laboratory prototype. The
Scott Transformer can be seen at the top of the picture and the
rectifier at the bottom of the picture.
Figs. 16, 18, and 20 show the experimental results of the
12 kW prototype. The THD of the line voltages were 3.23%,
3.34% and 3.57%. The THD of the line currents were 4.95%,
5.48%, and 5.61% (Figs. 17, 19, and 21). They are nearly sinu- Fig. 18. Phase voltage v (t) and current i (t) (10 A/division and 5 ms/divi-
soidal in shape. The power factor per phase was: 0.989, 0.985, sion).
and 0.981, respectively.
Fig. 22 shows input currents and of the boost
PFCs, which are 90 phase-shifted from each other with equal Both currents and present distortion at zero
amplitudes, and confirms that the output power of the two boost crossing which is characteristic of single-phase boost PFC con-
PFCs are equal. verters. This distortion propagates through the transformer and
BADIN AND BARBI: UNITY POWER FACTOR ISOLATED THREE-PHASE RECTIFIER
Fig. 19. Normalized line current harmonics (phase B).
Fig. 20. Phase voltage v (t) and current i (t) (10 A/division and 5 ms/divi-
sion).
Fig. 21. Normalized line current harmonics (phase C).
appears in the primary currents. It is clear from Fig. 16 that the
phase A current presents distortion at zero crossing. The zero
crossing distortion is phase shifted in phase currents B and C,
Figs. 18 and 20, respectively, due to the current interaction in
the Scott transformer.
Fig. 23 presents output voltages and , the
latter being scaled by a factor of 2. Note that the 120 Hz ripple
1285
Fig. 22. Currents i (t) and i (t) of each boost PFC (20 A/division and
5 ms/division).
Fig. 23. Output voltage ripple (5 V/division and 2 ms/division).
in voltages and are out of phase which results in
practically no 120 Hz ripple in output voltage .
Figs. 20 and 24 show the experimental results to verify the
performance of the control loops when the rectifier suffers load
variations from 67% of the rated load to 100%.
Fig. 25 presents output voltages and when the
rectifier suffers a load unbalance in relation to the split dc-bus.
Initially both converters operate at 3.6 kW. After the transient,
one of the converters operates at 5.6 kW while the other remains
at 3.6 kW. The line currents, after the transient, are presented in
Fig. 26. Note the imbalance among currents and
due to the load imbalance of the boost converters. It is
important to stress that these currents still present low harmonic
distortion.
Fig. 27 shows the tested efficiency of the three-phase rectifier
for two cases: with transformer losses and without transformer
losses. The efficiency data were measured for an output power
range of 25% to 95% of 12 kW. A peak efficiency of 97.12% was
1286
Fig. 24. Line currents after a 33% increase in the load, 7.2 kW to 11.2 kW.
(20 A/division and 10 ms/division).
Fig. 25. Output voltages after an increase in the load of one of the converters,
3.6 kW and 3.6 kW to 3.6 kW and 5.6 kW. (10 V/division and 20 ms/division).
obtained at 11 kW without transformer losses. Higher efficiency
could be obtained by changing the iron-core inductors to ferrite-
core inductors.
VI. CONCLUSION
In this paper a unity power factor isolated three-phase rec-
tifier with a split dc-bus, based on the Scott transformer, and
with a new series-connection was obtained. It presents only two
switches and a balanced split dc-bus. Two standard single-phase
PFC modules, where each module is rated for half of the output
power, were used. The resulting input line currents are nearly
sinusoidal in shape.
The maximum voltage across the switches is half of . This
fact allows the use of switches with lower voltage ratings, which
could be implemented by power MOSFETs instead of the tra-
ditional IGBT. This substitution would allow the maximum fre-
IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 23, NO. 3, MAY 2008
Fig. 26. Line currents for the case of unbalanced loads. (10 A/division and
10 ms/division).
Fig. 27. Converter efficiency.
quency of operation of the converters to be increased, conse-
quently reducing the losses and volume.
A common voltage control loop for both boost PFCs is nec-
essary to equally distribute the total power between them when
the load is balanced. A second voltage loop is used in order to
obtain a balanced split dc-bus.
A 12 kW laboratory prototype was implemented. The exper-
imental results demonstrate the performance of the proposed
system.
The use of the Scott transformer increases the cost of the
three-phase rectifier and compromises the overall efficiency.
However, low frequency isolation is desirable in some appli-
cations due to the robustness and safety it provides. In these
cases, this rectifier is certainly an option since it presents unity
power factor by using only two active switches and it uses a
simple and well-known control strategy.
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Alceu André Badin (S’07) was born in Maravilha,
Santa Catarina, Brazil, in 1979. He received the B.S.
and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from the
Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis,
Brazil, in 2004 and 2006, respectively, where he is
currently pursuing the Ph.D. degree.
His research interests include power factor correc-
tion and power quality.
Ivo Barbi (M’76–SM’90) was born in Gaspar,
Santa Catarina, Brazil, in 1949. He received the
B.S. and M.S. degrees in electrical engineering from
Federal University of Santa Catarina, Florianópolis,
Brazil, in 1973 and 1976, respectively, and the Ph.D.
degree from the Institut National Polytechnique de
Toulouse, France, in 1979.
He founded the Brazilian Power Electronics So-
ciety and the Power Electronics Institute of the Fed-
eral University of Santa Catarina. Currently he is Pro-
fessor of the Power Electronics Institute of the Fed-
eral University of Santa Catarina.