Future Drives of Home Appliances: Elimination of the Electrolytic DC-Link Capacitor in Electrical Drives for Home Appliances

This article describes the next step in the development of the home appliance motor drive-the elimination of the electrolytic dc-link capacitor and the substitution of one with a small film. A small film capacitor increases total device reliability and improves the spectrum of the input current so the power factor corrector (PFC) used to satisfy existing standards on harmonic current emission can be omitted, which decreases the size and cost of the appliances. This article also proposes simple modifications to the standard vector control scheme, making operation with pulsating dc-link voltage possible.