Solar Powered Off-board Electric Vehicle Charger with Reconfigurable Power Electronic Interface

Abstract

The growth and usage of the electric vehicle is on the rise over the past few years. Demerits of conventional IC engine vehicles like depletion of fossil fuel, increase in fuel price and negative impacts on the environment made us to shift to electric vehicles. The fuel for electric vehicle is electrical energy which is extracted from the power grid through charging station. In the power grid, the energy share from conventional energy sources are high, that too coal, which again leads to the same negative impacts as like IC engine vehicles. Hence the energy share for charging the electric vehicles should be predominantly from renewable energy sources. Thus renewable energy based charging stations are need to be developed more. The proposed system is a renewable energy based charging station, which aims at charging the electric vehicle throughout the day (24 hours) with the help of solar photovoltaic system and energy storage system. Further, the system operates in five modes of operation with the help of only two converters, namely a unidirectional dc-dc converter and a bidirectional dc-dc converter. Four relay switches are used to reconFigure the power electronic interface to operate the system in five different modes. The proposed system is simulated using PSIM and results are validated for all five modes of operations.