1428 IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON POWER ELECTRONICS, VOL. 24, NO. 5, MAY2009
Letters
Phase Feedforward Control for Single-Phase Boost-Type SMR
Hung-Chi Chen, Member, IEEE, Heng-Yi Li, and Ru-Shiuan Yang
Abstract—In this letter, a phase feedforward control (PFFC) for
a single-phase boost-type switching-mode rectifier is addressed. In
the conventional input voltage feedforward loop, the feedforward
signal is fixed regardless of the load level. The proposed phase
feedforward signal adjusts according to the load level without sens-
ing the load current. The simulated and experimental results also
demonstrate the effectiveness of proposed PFFC. Compared to a
conventional feedforward signal, relatively small proportional gain
can be used in the proposed PFFC without loss of current tracking
performance, which would also increase the overall system immu-
nity against noise.
Index Terms—AC–DC power conversion.
I. INTRODUCTION
T
HE USE of switching-mode rectifier (SMR) with power
factor correction (PFC) function is an effective mean to
perform the qualified ac/dc conversion. In general, the PFC
function includes the input current waveform shaping and the
output dc voltage regulation.
The boost-type SMRs are the most popular circuit topology
among all the others for their continuous current in the front-end
inductors [1]. In a boost-type SMR, large-scale input voltage
variation can be seen as a disturbance. It follows that input
voltage feedforward loops [2]–[6] for boost-type SMRs can be
found often in the literature.
The concept of the input voltage feedforward loop is to gen-
erate a “nominal duty ratio pattern” from the rectified input
voltage. This nominal duty ratio pattern effectively produces
an average voltage across the switch equal to the instantaneous
rectified input voltage. However, it is noted that this nominal
duty ratio pattern is fixed regardless of load condition [3]–[5],
i.e., the conventional input feedforward signal at heavy load is
the same as that at light load. It implies that the performance
of current shaping function would be degraded at heavy load.
To overcome it, several load feedforward loops without sensing
load current had been proposed in [6], [7] where the load condi-
tion is estimated from the reference current. The proposed phase
feedforward control (PFFC) can be regarded as a combination of
input voltage feedforward control and load feedforward control.
In PFFC, the original phase feedforward signal is also gener-
ated from the rectified input voltage and then delayed through
Manuscript received August 3, 2008; revised November 11, 2008, and January
6, 2009. Current version published May 15, 2009. This work was supported by
the National Science Council in Taiwan under Grant NSC97-2221-E-009-184.
Recommended for publication by Associate Editor J. Jatskevich.
The authors are with the Department of Electrical and Control Engineer-
ing (ECE), National Chiao Tung University (NCTU), Hsinchu 30010, Taiwan
(e-mail: hcchen@cn.nctu.edu.tw; hyli@iner.gov.tw; rushiuan@gmail.com).
Digital Object Identifier 10.1109/TPEL.2009.2013953
Fig. 1. Power circuit of the boost-type SMR.
phase shifter according to the current reference magnitude. The
larger the current magnitude is, the more the shifting phase of
phase feedforward signal can be found. Compared to the conven-
tional input voltage feedforward control, the proposed PFFC is
able to adjust the feedforward signal according to the load level
and relatively small proportional gain can be used to yield the
desired current tracking performances and increase the overall
system immunity against noise.
From the viewpoint of implementation, the proposed PFFC
can also be seen as a combination of a phase shifter with varying
phase and two “fixed gain” blocks. It is well-known that imple-
menting a phase shifter with varying phase in analog circuit is
significantly harder than that in a digital system [like DSP/field-
programmable gate array (FPGA)]. Therefore, there is near-zero
complexity added to the digital implementation of PFFC.
After the development of PFFC, we also find that the
proposed PFFC can be seen as various implementations of
the “full feedforward control,” and therefore, the performance
improvement of PFFC is limited compared to [7]. However,
implementing “full feedforward control” in analog circuits is
easier than that in a digital system due to its calculation load of
current loop, such as the PI current controller and derivative of
the reference current. Therefore, “full feedforward control” is
preferred in an analog circuit and the proposed PFFC is suitable
for a digital PFC controller.
II. CONVENTIONAL FEEDFORWARD CONTROL
Power circuit configuration of a boost-type SMR is shown in
Fig. 1. The circuit mainly consists of a diode bridge rectifier and
a boost-type dc/dc converter. The input voltage v
s
can be ex-
pressed by
ˆ
V
s
sin(2πf
in
t), where f
in
is the input line frequency.
To simplify the analysis, some assumptions are made.
1) The circuit components are lossless and the circuit in-
cludes a reasonable bulk capacitor C
d
.
2) The switching frequency f
tri
is significantly higher than
the line frequency f
in
.
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