Patent ID: 8525491

Claim:
A vehicle generator comprising: an armature winding including a plurality of phase windings; a switching section constituted as a bridge circuit including a plurality of pairs of an upper arm and a lower arm connected in series to rectify phase voltages induced in the phase windings, each of the upper and lower arms being constituted of a switching element parallel-connected with a diode; and a control section for controlling on/off timings of the switching elements; wherein the control section is configured to perform a switching operation to switch the switching section between a first operation state where, for each of the pairs of the upper and lower arms, the upper arm is turned off when a corresponding one of the phase voltages is higher than a battery voltage of a battery charged by the vehicle generator through the switching section and a second operation state where, for each of the pairs of the upper and lower arms, the upper arm is turned off after a corresponding one of the phase voltages becomes lower than the battery voltage, and configured to delay off timings to turn off the switching elements stepwise when the switching section is in the second operation state.