Analysis and design of a single-phase AC/DC step-down converter for universal input voltage

This work presents a single-phase AC/DC step-down converter, which is composed of two power stages, buck-boost converter and buck converter. The front stage is used for a power-factor-correction (PFC) circuit and is operated in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) by using the pulse-width modulation (PWM) technique to achieve almost unity power factor and low total harmonic distortion of input current (THDi). The rear stage is also operated in DCM to achieve voltage step-down and low DC-link voltage. The proposed converter can be applied for universal input voltage (85–265 V) and wide output power range. Also, the steady-state analysis of voltage gain and boundary operating condition are presented. Moreover, the selections of inductors, capacitors and input filter are depicted. Finally, a hardware circuit with simple control logic is implemented to illustrate the theoretical analysis.