Magnetic Components Reduction in a Three-Phase PFC Converter by Using a Reconfigurable LCL Filter

Three-phase power factor correction (PFC) converters are the front-end stage of the power conversion that are required to be connected to the grid with a proper filter to meet international standards. A high-order LCL filter is a widely used solution to reduce the component size of the filter although it requires six inductors. In this article, a novel reconfigurable LCL filter that consists of only three inductors is proposed. The principle of the reconfigurable filter is to fully utilize the converter-side inductors by changing their position from the converter side to the grid side and vice versa. The filter is reconfigured by using three low-frequency (LF) bidirectional switches. The ultimate goal of the proposed topology is to reduce the magnetic components by half and achieve comparable grid current quality as the conventional topology. The proposed PFC topology is verified by a 1-kW experimental prototype. All the experimental results agree with the theoretical concepts and prove that the grid current quality of the proposed topology is comparable with the conventional topology.