Novel ways to improve rectifier performance from power systems´ reliability viewpoint

Technical advances are of no real relevance to a user, if they cannot offer benefits which can be measured in terms of money. The countable measures are such as improvements in equipment and system reliability, in efficiency resulting in lower internal temperature, in weight and need of space as well as in lower price. However, quite often the benefits are just marginal from the users´ viewpoint. The reason is the overutilization of the obtained benefits and this can, for instance, be realized in lower reliability performance, higher price, etc. The main source of uncertainty is always public power i.e. the energy flow is not perfectly continuous. It is normally the level of voltage in public power lines which determines whether the energy is available (i.e. usable) or not. The number of outages and brownouts can be substantially reduced by means of a rectifier system which has a proper amount of filtering capacity and an adaptive (i.e. load power depending) undervoltage shut down feature. There are also other topics mainly related to system reliability from the rectifier viewpoint such as output overvoltage shut down, testing of batteries by discharging, rectifier failure detection, etc. which are discussed and solutions proposed