Week of 9/17/2023
This week I have been looking into passive vs. active power factor correction (PFC) to learn which would be a more viable option for our project. Passive PFC won for its simplicity in footprint, circuit design, and decreased cost. The second part which has been my main focus was designing the output filter for our rectifier. This is being done by assuming a perfect AC input with zero noise which will then be incorporated and tweaked to match performance with the filtered input from mains and the buck converter to step our DC voltage down to the 12V, 5V, and 3.3V rails we need. The design has landed on an LC filter to rectify the voltage. The best performing circuit I have found so far has a ripple voltage of ~1.7%. Adding second inductor further improves upon the smoothing but the planned converter to step down to an input voltage for our regulators will also effect the ripple voltage so that will need to be implemented into the simulation before final tuning is done.
