Evaluation of power density of a reduced switch count five-level three-phase PWM rectifier for aircraft applications

Recently, more electric aircraft concept is attracted to achieve more light weight and downsizing of an aircraft. This paper proposes a novel five-level three-phase rectifier topology, which combines the DCLP and FC type converters has been proposed. The proposed converter requires only half of the number of switches in comparison with the DCLP and FC types, that is, only 12 switches are used for the five-level rectifier. Moreover, the volume of the input boost reactor can be reduced due to 5-level input voltage waveform of the rectifier. This paper establishes the optimization design method of the boost-up reactor, clamping capacitor and power devices in order to achieve high power density. Besides, its volume and power-density are obtained by the theoretical analysis.