A Transformerless Cascade Multilevel PWM Rectifier with Unity Power Factor

This paper presents a casca multilevel PWM rectifier without the isolation transformers for energy build-up at each inverter modules; The features and advantages of the proposed PWM rectifier can be summarized as follows; 1) It realizes the high power high voltage AC/DC power conversion, 2) It uses no transformer which is bulky and heavy, 3) It has hybrid structure so that switching devices can be effectively utilized, 4) It produces high quality AC current even in high power high voltage applications, 5) The input power factor remains unity by simple modulation index control. The multilevel rectifier is analyzed by using the circuit DQ transformation whereby the characteristics and control equations are obtained. Finally, it will be shown that the system simulation reveals the validity of analyses