PFC bridge converter for voltage-controlled adjustable-speed PMBLDCM drive

Abstract

In this paper, a buck DC-DC bridge converter is used as a power factor correction (PFC) converter for feeding a voltage source inverter (VSI) based permanent magnet brushless DC motor (PMBLDCM) drive. The front end of the PFC converter is a diode bridge rectifier (DBR) fed from single phase AC mains. The PMBLDCM is used to drive the compressor of an air conditioner through a three-phase voltage source inverter (VSI) fed from a variable voltage DC link. The speed of the air conditioner is controlled to conserve energy using a new concept of voltage control at a DC link proportional to the desired speed of the PMBLDC motor. Therefore, VSI operates only as an electronic commutator of the PMBLDCM. The current of the PMBLDCM is controlled by setting the reference voltage at the DC link as a ramp. The proposed PMBLDCM drive with voltage control-based PFC converter was designed and modeled. The performance is simulated in Matlab-Simulink environment for an air conditioner compressor load driven through a 3.75 kW, 1500 rpm PMBLDC motor. To validate the effectiveness of the proposed speed control scheme, the evaluation results demonstrate improved efficiency of the complete drive with the PFC feature in a wide range of speed and input AC voltage.