ST.COM reference design: 15 kW, 3-phase Vienna rectifier PFC

[Mads Barnkob]

Just saw this nice free, open reference design for a 15kW 3-phase 800VDC PFC frontend with all firmware, schematics, board files and BOM available on st.com, I can recommend their newsletter where I got this from today.

https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stdes-viennarect.html

I have little to no time to look it through, but hopefully someone will find this information useful

There was also a "15 kW, three-phase, three-level Active Front End (AFE) bidirectional converter for industrial and electric vehicle DC fast charging applications": https://www.st.com/en/evaluation-tools/stdes-pfcbidir.html

[rikkitikkitavi]

I would begin here:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vienna_rectifier

Looks complicated, probably why they need a DSP-cum-MCU to control it.

[Da_Stier]

I had a closer look at the data they offer.
... After fighting my way throgh to the actual downloads 
It seems to be rather complete, atleast from an hardware view.

The BOM cost is around 200€ for the main expensive parts, plus all the small bits and pieces, so I would guess around 220€ in components for one module.
The PCBs add another 50€ if you get them from a chinese manufacturer, however I guess you want to go with atleast 70µm copper layers, which will double the cost.
In addition you need the ST-Link programmer / debugger, which is suprisingly only 25€.

On the software side they offer some librarys for the controller used and something that I guess is a linux VM or atleast some config files for one.
I didn't find a prewritten software to implement the function itself.

The design itself is propably as good as it can be, since it is literally made by the people developing most of the important components.
And being a eval board / design there are lot of included measurement points, testpoints and supervising circuits, which make debugging and developing rather easy.
However the work and money needed to get started on the design is quite high. (Atleast in my opinion)
Especially if you only plan to build a single unit, it will cost you atleast 300€ to get started.

BUT, if you want to go through there, I think it might actually be worth it.
Since you might be able to shrink the design down quite a bit, it is a very nice, compact, variable output voltage recitifier, especially since it can potentially provide 15kW.

[Da_Stier]

Sorry for doubleposting, but the edit function seems not to work it always complains "the text body has been left blank" 

But what I wanted to add is that there are only schematics as pdf and gerber files available which makes reusing or changing the design for your own projects rather complicated.
On the other hand ST would propably use Altium Designer or some other expensive program which would be hard to use anyway.
I just wanted to add that. 

[Mads Barnkob]

Thank you for running through it and giving back the most important points. 300€ is not bad for a 15 kW PFC 800VDC front end to be honest and thinking it into multiply large Tesla coils could result in building maybe 2-3-4 of them.

I am disappointed that the vienna control software is not included, that was my initial thought that this was EVERYthing to build it.

The downside to their "free" design is that you can never sell it and never base any product off their design. Read that somewhere in their files.