Design, Analysis and Fast Tuning of Active Front End Rectifier Controller with Comparative Performance Evaluation

Active front end (AFE) converters are very popular for rectification purposes in the industry due to the requirement of unity power factor operation with control over output DC voltage and bidirectional power flow. The control can be hysteresis based or feed-forward decoupling in synchronous reference frame. Feed-forward decoupling control requires accurate tuning of three-sets of proportional integral (PI) gains which can be tricky. This paper describes a simplified analysis of control loops for tuning of AFE converters which is validated using simulations in MATLAB Simulink and can serve as a quick starting point for AFE controller design. Additionally, comparison of performance of the converter in terms of total harmonic distortion (THD) is explored, using two different control and modulation methods: hysteresis control, as well as feed-forward decoupling using both sinusoidal PWM (SPWM) and space vector PWM (SVPWM).