A Novel DC Outlet with Adaptive Output Control for LVDC Household Power System

Abstract

With the development of Low voltage DC (LVDC) distribution system, the demand of household appliances witnesses continuous growth in a decade. For meeting different requirements, the voltage levels of the appliances become more various, which challenges their integration into the building and increases the design difficulty of a household outlet. Due to most household appliances supplied with DC power, the ideal outlet in the DC household power system should be a DC outlet with multilevel voltage outputs. However, it is not user-friendly for consumers. Moreover, the outlets with high voltage DC output increase the risk of appliance malfunction and electric shock, and the extra DC-DC conversion stages in the multilevel-buses LVDC system also increases the power loss and complicates the wiring topology. A novel design of DC household outlet is proposed in this paper. The proposed DC household outlet can distinguish the operating voltage of the household appliances automatically, and then supply the appropriate operating voltage for appliances. With the embedded DC-DC buck converter, a wide range of output voltage from 5V~400V can be provided by the proposed outlet. For verifying the performance of the proposed DC household outlet, the simulations on the power supply process of smartphone and electric kettle respectively are conducted on Matlab/Simulink. The simulation results show the feasibility of the proposed outlet topology and control scheme.