New design approaches to power conditioners for worst-case power quality environments

With the worldwide proliferation of computers and networks, power conditioning and protection has become a serious concern everywhere. In many developing countries, the expected "electronic grade" power is far from the "utility grade" power. For such situations, many AC voltage regulators, UPS systems and power conditioners designed with the assumption of reasonable power quality available from the utility AC supply is far from the demand from worst-case situations. Experiencing such real world situations, several novel design approaches were successfully attempted by the author(s) within the past decade based on fully solid state AC regulator techniques with fast response, as well as DSP based control loops in the inverter designs etc. A series BJT array as the control element in an AC regulator, use of low cost MOS gate drivers and DSP control loop for inverters are few such examples for power conditioner capacities from 200 VA to over 2 kVA. The article summarizes the approaches, and the past and progressive work in this area with a view to invite more contribution from power quality researchers.