An adaptive passivity-based controller for a unity power factor rectifier

We develop in this paper a passivity-based control scheme for the Feedback regulation of a class of switched power converters commonly addressed as po wer factor precompensators. In such applications, aside from load voltage r egulation to a prespecified constant level, a vital additional control obje ctive consists in keeping the input power factor close to unity. By forcing the converter input current to follow a sinusoidal reference signal which is in phase with the supplied voltage, one may approximately satisfy both c ontrol objectives within a single power stage. A further complication in ou r design is to consider the output load, usually modeled by a resistance, a s unknown. Experimental results are furnished for assessing the performance of the proposed feedback control law.