3 Phase Tricks

The voltages of the 3 phases are normally sinusoidal but the important metric is the voltage difference between the phases. Notice that the minimum and maximum voltages don't occur at the same time for all phases.

A convenient trick is to adjust the phases so that the minimum voltage is always zero for some phase. The phase voltages below are equivalent to those above. Notice that we use 86% of the voltage range after the adjustment. We can thus scale our voltages by 1.16 in order to use the full range and get 15% more effective voltage (in the rotating phasor frame).