A Bidirectional Electric Vehicle Charger for Wide Output Voltage Range Application

Abstract

In a home, off-board chargers are required to charge low voltage powered electric vehicles (LEVs) as well as high voltage powered electric vehicles (HEVs). Keeping this in view, this work presents the design and control of a single-stage bidirectional electric vehicle (EV) charger with a wide output voltage range from 72 V to 240 V. Moreover, the presented bidirectional EV charger facilitates the user to utilize the vehicle battery to supply the home loads, i.e. vehicle-to-home operation during the unavailability of grid power. A bidirectional bridgeless Cuk converter with a switched inductor is designed and analyzed for this EV charger. The main advantages of this bidirectional EV charger are regulated battery current and enhanced grid side performance with reduced component count during the bidirectional operation. The steady-state and dynamic performances of the designed battery charger are investigated under distinct operating conditions during EV charging and vehicle-to-home operation. At last, the efficacy of the battery EV charger is tested to comply with IEC 61000-3-2 standard for power quality and bidirectional operation with NEMA PE-5 standard towards battery current.