primary side charging inductors

["Tesla list" <tesla@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Original poster: Jim Lux <jimlux@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

The recent discussion about CAUAC's primary side inductors brings up an 
interesting point.  If you have 3 phase power, this works very 
nicely.    The idea of putting the choke on the primary is very attractive 
because
a) it's at a reasonable voltage
b) you have the transformer working for you, so you don't need as much 
inductance

Rather than trying to make huge inductors (albeit at low currents) that can 
hold off tens of kV, you can make (or buy) a high current, low voltage 
inductor.

But, what if you have single phase power, still want to do DC resonant 
charging.  (not rectified AC, but real DC).

Obviously, this doesn't work if you have a big honking (term of art) filter 
capacitor.

It might be that overall, the total system might be smaller and lighter 
weight if you used a rotary converter (or, maybe, some combination of L and 
C on the primary side, like big arc welders do) to synthesize 3 phases.

Ultimately, I suppose that the energy stored in the inductor is the same, 
so it will be about the same size, regardless of position.

In fact, perhaps the rotary converter could serve as the inductor (if it 
were a wound rotor var compensator/synchronous condenser, it almost 
certainly could).

We're talking here about systems that are >10kVA (for smaller, it's 
probably not worth it), but that are still running off single phase.