Fully controlled 5-phase, 10-pulse, line commutated rectifier

The development and production of multiphase machines either generators or motors, specially five-phase, offers improved performance compared to three-phase counterpart. Five phase generators could generate power in applications such as, but not limited to, wind power generation, electric vehicles, aerospace, and oil and gas. The five-phase generator output requires converter system such as ac-dc converters. In this paper, a fully controlled 10-pulse line commutated rectifier, suitable to be engaged with wind energy applications, fed from five-phase source is introduced. A shunt active power filter (APF) is used to improve power factor and supply current total harmonic distortion (THD). Compared to three-phase converters, 6-pulse or 12-pulse rectifiers, the 10-pulse rectifier engaged with 5-phase source alleviate their drawbacks such as high dc ripples and no need for electric gear or phase shifting transformer. MATLAB/SIMULINK platform is used as a simulation tool to investigate the performance of the proposed rectifier.