Fast Charging of Hybrid Electric Vehicles

There is a growing interest in electric vehicle and hybrid electric vehicles due to their reduced
emissions and higher efficiencies. Electric vehicle chargers can be broadly classified into two
categories: On board and off-board chargers. On-board chargers have all the necessary on the
vehicle itself to power electronics in the vehicle to enable charging from utility outlet.
Chargers can be classified based on power flow capability as well. Unidirectional chargers
require less complicated circuits and simplifies interconnection issues. Bidirectional chargers
are more complicated and support vehicle to grid (V2G) operation.

The chargers can also be classified based on power levels. Level 1 charging takes place at
lower powers (up to 2kW) and can be done from a conventional utility outlet. Typical
charging times are 4-11 hours for an EV rated at 5-15kWh. Level 2 charging takes place at
power levels up to 20kW and usually done at commercial outlets. Typical charging times are
1-4 hours. However, to match the quick refilling capability of conventional gas-powered
vehicles, a high-power charging is required. Typical power levels of a Level 3 charger range
from 50-100 kW and the charging time is around 0.2 hours or even less.

State of the art low power Level 1 chargers consist of boost converter for active power factor
correction. Bridgeless PFC topologies and interleaving of PFC units is done to reduce current
ripple [1][2]. Single phase and three phase active front end converters are followed by a DC-
DC converter are used for medium power levels (up to 10 kW).

The concept of fast charging is already under implementation by leading manufacturers such
as Siemens, ABB, Enercon. All industrial available fast charging stations have connection to
a MV grid using a low frequency transformer which steps down the input to 415/ 690 V. The
low voltage AC is followed by AC-DC and DC-DC conversion stages. Multilevel converters
are suitable for the AC-DC stage since they reduce filter size, switching frequency, and the
stress on devices [3][4].

Since the low frequency transformer is large and bulky, the power rating and the number of
charging outlets is limited for such units. Moreover conversion of power at lower voltage
leads to higher currents resulting in losses and reduced efficiency. Solutions have been
proposed in literature which make use of an AC-DC stage having a direct connection to the
MV grid followed by an isolated DC-DC converter stage [5]. The main challenge of the
AC/DC converter is to handle the MV, and its associated device requirements of the blocking
voltage. MV converter can be built with multilevel topologies (i.e. three level NPC, cascaded
H bridge, etc).

Providing isolation at a higher frequency results in reduction of transformer size and

improvement of power density. The DC-DC stage is very challenging because of the isolation
requirement, high input voltage and high output currents. Furthermore, the architecture needs
to be scalable in the power level. From the device point of view especially the development
of new device technologies i.e. wide-band-gap devices like silicon carbide (SiC), enables
compact design structures with high power densities. On the proposed background, especially
soft switching converter architectures (Dual Active Bridge (DAB), LLC, Phase Shifted Full
Bridge (PSFB)), enabling zero voltage switching (ZVS) conditions, are most suitable to
satisfy the requirements.

Multiple stages of power conversion require a large bulky capacitor between the AC-DC and
DC-DC stages. This leads to reduction of reliability and power density. Single stage
topologies carry out the power transfer from AC to DC side without the bulky intermediate
capacitor.

References:

[1] C. Lee, J. Jeong, B. Lee and J. Hur, "Study on 1.5 kW battery chargers for neighbourhood
electric vehicles," 2011 IEEE Vehicle Power and Propulsion Conference, Chicago, IL, 2011,
pp. 1-4.

[2] F. Musavi, M. Edington, W. Eberle and W. G. Dunford, "Evaluation and Efficiency

Comparison of Front-End AC-DC Plug-in Hybrid Charger Topologies," in IEEE
Transactions on Smart Grid, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 413-421, March 2012.

[3] M. Vasiladiotis, B. Bahrani, N. Burger and A. Rufer, "Modular converter architecture for
medium voltage ultra-fast EV charging stations: Dual half-bridge-based isolation
stage," 2014 International Power Electronics Conference (IPEC-Hiroshima 2014 - ECCE
ASIA), Hiroshima, 2014, pp. 1386-1393.

[4] S. Rivera, B. Wu, S. Kouro, V. Yaramasu and J. Wang, "Electric Vehicle Charging
Station Using a Neutral Point Clamped Converter with Bipolar DC Bus," in IEEE
Transactions on Industrial Electronics, vol. 62, no. 4, pp. 1999-2009, April 2015.

[5] F. Hoffmann, L. Camurca and M. Liserre, "Modular EV Fast Charging Station

Architectures based on Multiphase-Medium-Frequency Transformer," IECON 2018 - 44th
Annual Conference of the IEEE Industrial Electronics Society, Washington, DC, 2018, pp.
1327-1332.

[6] P. He and A. Khaligh, "Comprehensive Analyses and Comparison of 1 kW Isolated DC–

DC Converters for Bidirectional EV Charging Systems," in IEEE Transactions on
Transportation Electrification, vol. 3, no. 1, pp. 147-156, March 2017.

[7] A. Moeini and S. Wang, "Design of fast charging technique for electrical vehicle charging
stations with grid-tied cascaded H-bridge multilevel converters," 2018 IEEE Applied Power
Electronics Conference and Exposition (APEC), San Antonio, TX, 2018, pp. 3583-3590.