Five-Level Reduced-Switch-Count Boost PFC Rectifier with Intelligent Controller

A five-level Power Factor Correction incremental rectifier (PFC) is proposed in this paper. In this topology, the output voltage and current of the rectifier are controlled using the multilevel modulation and smart controller technologies. A multi-carrier pulse width modulation is used to create the switching pulse. In this topology, the number of semiconductor switches is reduced to 3. The smart controller is implemented using a Multilayer Perceptron (MLP) neural network and it is trained using the backpropagation algorithm. This controller is used instead of the well-known PID controller to control the input voltage and current. It should be noted that in this work, the goal is to design an intelligent controller using a neural network instead of a PID controller. The results obtained using this controller as compared to the PID controller show a decrease in the peak voltage, an increase in the rise time, and a ripple reduction in the output voltage. This study is conducted using the Simulink environment in MATLAB and the results suggest that a smart controller can be an alternative to the PID controller.