Solar Photovoltaic Fed Fast Charging Power Converters For Electric Vehicles

Transportation electrification is much needed as it can help to reduce the consumption of petroleum fuels. At the same time importance of the charging system to energize electric vehicles is also growing. Currently AC level 1 charging (120V, <2KW) and AC level 2 Charging (240V, <10KW) are used to charge the electric vehicle in residential and workplaces. Still, the consumer is not interested to buy the electric vehicle because of the prolonged charging time. Even though DC fast-charging stations are available commercially, those also significantly take more charging time when compared to refueling IC engine-powered vehicles. There is always a huge requirement for power converters in solar photovoltaic systems. Among onboard and off-board chargers, the off-board chargers have significance as they can charge the vehicles in less time similar to gas/petrol stations. These off-board charging stations are comprised of two power conversion stages. One is for the rectification process along with power factor correction to obtain DC output from the input utility grid and DC/DC stage to get the regulated DC voltage from the rectifier output. One can reduce the charging time by increasing the output charging power at the power conversion stage. Hence, the present work deals with a novel DC-DC converter topology for fast charging applications and the novelty lies in the Electric vehicle charging system with a reduced number of components along with a modified voltage lift switched inductor to get more output power and an isolation transformer to connect the battery to the converter to safeguard the source and load, even if any maloperation occurred. The developed converter is tested through simulation by exposing it to grid integration through an inverter, when fed from a solar PV array and fast battery charging algorithms are deployed to reduce the charging time which is suitable for Vehicle to Grid (V2G) and Grid to Vehicle (G2V) applications.