Design, construction and implementation of a highly efficient, lightweight and cost effective battery charger for electric easy bikes

Abstract

Electric three-wheeler auto rickshaws known as easy bikes are becoming quite common in Bangladesh. Due to obvious advantages offered by these vehicles such as zero carbon emission and no requirement of gas encourages people to transition from traditional fuel-operated vehicle to electric vehicles. The battery charging stations for these vehicles employ bulky chargers containing iron core transformers with maximum efficiency around 80%. As a country which suffers from power shortages, it is highly desirable to have a charger that is more efficient. In this paper, a new type of charger is proposed which uses a ferrite core transformer. A prototype of this charger is built and compared with a conventional charger. It is found from the experiments that the proposed charger exhibits efficiency more than 90%. In addition, the proposed charger weighs only about 2 kilograms, whereas the conventional charger weighs about 10 kilograms.