Low-harmonic three-phase rectifier

A new three-phase low-harmonic rectifier is proposed in this paper. The rectifier consists of a diode bridge, three bi-directional switches that are switched at the double of the line frequency, and a current shaping network. The current shaping network consists of two capacitors and three resistors or switching resistance emulators. The power processed by the resistors or resistance emulators equals 8.81% of the input power. The rectifier is suitable for application at medium and high power levels since only the small amount of power is processed by high-frequency switching converters, and as a retrofit upgrade of existing rectifiers, requiring connection at only five points. Design guidelines are presented. Analytical results are experimentally verified on a 2 kW rectifier.