Analysis and design of a single-phase AC/DC step-down converter for universal input voltage

This work presents a single-phase AC/DC step-down converter, which is composed of two power stages, buck-boost converter and buck converter. The front stage is used for a power-factor-correction (PFC) circuit and is operated in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) by using the pulse-width modulation (PWM) technique to achieve almost unity power factor and low total harmonic distortion of input current (THD_i). The rear stage is also operated in DCM to achieve voltage step-down and low DC-link voltage. The proposed converter can be applied for universal input voltage (85-265V) and wide output power range. Also, the steady-state analysis of voltage gain and boundary operating condition are presented. Moreover, the selections of inductors, capacitors and input filter are depicted. Finally, a hardware circuit with simple control logic is implemented to illustrate the theoretical analysis.