Performance of Single Phase Full Wave Rectifier Controlled by PWM

Semiconductor switching devices produce significant harmonic voltages as they chop voltage waveform during the transition between conducting and cutoff stages. The diode bridge rectifiers are considered as a major contributor to the power system harmonics and the consequences are varying from components overheating to communication interference. The scope of this paper is the harmonic voltages at the output of full wave rectifier and the way to control the distribution of the components of Fourier series. A PWM based switching technique is proposed to shift the low-order harmonics to higher frequencies away from the fundamental to be easily filtered. The paper also presents a comparison with Pspice simulation and experimental values.