A bidirectional DC/DC converter for renewable energy source-fed EV charging stations with enhanced DC link voltage and ripple frequency management

Abstract

The amount of electricity that the grid must supply has increased as the number of electric vehicles (EVs) has increased. The best way to minimize power pollution between the automobile and the grid is to use an EV charging station to establish a bidirectional connection with an energy storage unit (ESU). This paper proposes a bidirectional DC/DC converter for battery available at the renewable energy sources (RES) fed charging station. This bidirectional DC-DC converter has important advantages such as dc link voltage stress reduction and the ripple frequency of inductor current is two times of the converter's switching frequency. The proposed converter consists of two identical Zero Voltage Transition (ZVT) cells and each cell includes a capacitor, two resonant inductors and a supplementary switch which is combined with the traditional three level topology that enables both buck and boost operating modes. The simulation-based analysis has been done using MATLAB/Simulink. The simulation results have been verified with the help of experimental setup is presented for the converter module for validating the charging station.

Keywords

• Electric vehicle charging
• Bidirectional converter
• Zero Voltage Transition (ZVT)
• Photovoltaic (PV) system