Comparative investigation of the energy recycler for power electronics burn-in test

Conventional power electronic bum-in testing consumes a huge amount of energy and adds up to a significant part of the manufacturing cost. To improve ths situation, a regenerative load system can be used to feed back bum-in test power to the utility system for energy recycling, and a number of solutions in accordance with the test equipment can be chosen. The paper analyses feasible ideas presented in recent literature, and proposes a novel strategy for the implementation of the energy recycler to power electronics bum-in test. The proposed idea is based on the voltage source inverter which uses current-mode control, and is regulated by conventional PWM strategy. It has an additional function of reactive power and current harmonic compensation in comparison with the other literature. A family of energy recyclers is presented, that has the same control strategy in order to include all possible applications. Comparative case studies using unintenuptible power supplies (UPSs), battery chargers and adjustable speed drives (implemented by scalar control) are demonstrated by means of prototype experiments to prove the performance and effectiveness.