Practical considerations of the start-up procedure for an active capacitor

Capacitive DC links provide the only low-impedance current path connected with an input source during the start-up of many voltage source converters. A soft-start circuit is usually implemented to limit the inrush current. A two-terminal active capacitor is recently proposed which can directly replace conventional passive capacitors in DC links, with reduced cost or size for a given application. The active capacitor has the same level of convenience with two power terminals only as a passive capacitor. This paper proposes two start-up schemes for the active capacitor to overcome the drawbacks of existing methods previously widely used for passive capacitors. One scheme is based on a trade-off design between the start-up performance and the component sizing of the active capacitor. The other scheme is based on either an additional bypass switch together with the existing soft-start circuit in the DC bus or a start-up circuit fully integrated in the active capacitor. The theoretical analyses and experiments are presented. A case study on a single-phase full-bridge rectifier demonstrates the effectiveness of the implemented start-up schemes.