A converter that changes one AC power to another is called an AC/AC converter. The AC/AC converter has become a research topic in the field of power electronics because of its applications converting one AC voltage to another, including lighting control, soft start of induction motors, blowers and pumps.
An AC/AC converter has several conversion modes, among which the method of directly changing the input AC voltage to another AC voltage based on the operating principle of a direct buck-type DC/DC converter can implement PWM (Pulse Width Modulation) control to smoothly control the amplitude value of the output voltage.
O Yong Hun, a researcher at the Robotics Institute, has proposed a circuit planning for a buck-type direct AC/AC converter that can directly change AC voltage to lower AC voltage without the help of a transformer, based on the operation principle of a buck-type DC/DC converter. In addition, he has investigated the correlation between the several factors affecting the input and output waveforms under constant load conditions by means of MATLAB simulations.
The theoretical study and simulations of a buck-type direct AC/AC converter can be concluded as follows: The buck-type direct AC/AC converter is theoretically possible and is applicable at small-scale yield power levels (500W), but in order to achieve high power, efforts should be directed to circuitry and space isolation problems to prevent harmonic production rather than enlarging the capacitance of the output device.
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