A Three-Phase Phase-Modular Single-Ended Primary-Inductance Converter Rectifier Operating in Discontinuous Conduction Mode for Small-Scale Wind Turbine Applications

Small-scale wind turbines play an important role in distributed generation since customers can use their houses, farms, and business to produce electric energy. The development of the power electronics system that processes the electric energy from small-scale wind turbines is a concern due to cost, simplicity, efficiency, and performance trade-offs. This paper presents the results of applying a three-phase phase-modular single-ended primary-inductance converter rectifier to processing the energy of a small-scale wind turbine system. The rectifier was designed according to the specifications of a commercial small-scale wind turbine system and tested in an emulator workbench, providing experimental data on the operation of the rectifier in this application. The rectifier can process the energy of a non-sinusoidal three-phase system since the permanent magnet synchronous generator has trapezoidal waveforms. The results show that the rectifier has the advantages of (i) using the inductance of the generator as the input filter inductor of the rectifier, (ii) providing input currents with the same shape as the voltages and in phase without the use of a current control system, (iii) simplicity of control of the DC output voltage and PWM modulation, and (iv) phase-modular characteristics that allow operating with phase fault without any additional control techniques. Due to the operation in discontinuous conduction mode, low efficiency in high power and/or low input voltage specifications are disadvantages.