An analytical inductor design procedure for three-phase PWM converters in power factor correction applications

This paper presents an analytical method for designing the inductor of three-phase power factor correction converters (PFCs). The complex behavior of the inductor current complicates the inductor design procedure as well as the core loss and copper loss calculations. Therefore, this paper analyzes the inductor voltage/current for sinusoidal pulse width modulation technique. Accordingly, the maximum current ripple as a function of the dc link voltage is derived and the minimum required inductance value is calculated. To explain the copper and the core losses in the inductor, the single-phase equivalent circuit is used to provide the inductor current harmonic spectrum. Therefore, using the harmonic spectrum, the low and high frequency copper losses are calculated. The high frequency minor B-H loops in one switching cycle are also analyzed. Then, the loss map provided by the measurement setup is used to calculate the core loss in the PFC application. To investigate the impact of the dc link voltage level, two inductors for different dc voltage levels are designed and the results are compared.