Design Methodology for Three-Phase Buck-Type and Boost-Type Rectifiers to Comply With the DO-160G Current Distortion Test

The main standard for avionic equipment DO-160G defines a set of tests that require compliance before the employment of a device in aircraft. An important test involves the generator voltage and consequential current distortion of the three-phase load in the variable 360-800 Hz frequency grid. The main purpose of this paper is to present and analyze a systematic design methodology for three-phase boost and buck rectifiers in order to meet with the voltage distortion test requirement. For a given voltage harmonic profile, the current harmonic limits that have to be satisfied are translated into equivalent per-harmonic admittances and a profile of maximum rectifier input admittance versus frequency is obtained. The defined profile, due to normalization, is applicable to arbitrary power level with simple shifting by the base admittance governed by the converter nominal power. It is shown that for boost-type rectifiers there is a tradeoff between current controller bandwidth and input inductor size, while for the bucktype rectifiers main limitation lies in the input LC filter design used for differential electromagnetic interference filtering. The experimental results conducted on an SiC three-phase 10 kW VIENNA rectifier are tightly backing up the proposed theoretical analysis. This paper is accompanied by three videos demonstrating experimental measurement of d-axis open-loop duty cycle to inductor current transfer function, loop-gain of d-axis current controller with 3.8 kHz bandwidth and variable grid frequency 360-800 Hz operation of the converter under 0% and 10% input three-phase voltage total harmonic distortion.