Fast Electric Vehicle (EV) chargers are necessary to reach the goal of reducing charging times and, consequently, to promote continuous EV adoption. However, minimizing the degradation of the EV battery is correspondingly important, which requires the design of fast EV chargers with low ripple or ripple-free current as a vital contribution to reduce internal heating and stress of the EV battery and improve its lifetime. This paper proposes a modular multi-output DC-DC converter operating in interleaved-based control and with ripple-free operation for a wide output EV battery voltage range. The results were obtained through simulations by considering 400 V and 800 V EV battery systems, and the individual power of each DC-DC of 50 kW. The results show the modularity of the DC-DC converter without the need for carrier synchronization and an analysis of efficiency estimation for different scenarios of power operation (maximum of 1.5 MW).

Voltage multiplier circuits play a crucial role in high-voltage DC power supplies. This paper proposes a bipolar hybrid symmetrical Cockcroft-Walton voltage multiplier for DC high-voltage applications. It consists in the connection of a positive and negative symmetrical voltage multiplier and a shared diode bridge. The proposed topology combines the advantages of the most common symmetrical voltage multipliers, resulting in a smaller and better-regulated output voltage drop, as well as reduced high-voltage isolation requirements and component count. Additionally, it does not require a center-tapped high-voltage transformer, reducing the system’s complexity. It fills the gap in the general framework of voltage multipliers and their respective bipolar topologies. The feasibility of the system has been numerically validated, and the performance of the proposed topology has been verified.

This paper presents a novel cascaded H-bridge converter based on interleaved full-bridge submodules, which offers significantly improved scalability in current ratings compared to traditional cascaded H-bridge configuration. The proposed design enables the use of low-cost, low-current power switches, reducing dependency on the larger and more expensive switches typically required in conventional systems. A key advantage of the interleaved configuration is its ability to virtually increase the number of output voltage levels by interleaving the operation of its submodules. This approach allows the system to replicate the benefits of traditional cascaded H-bridge converters, such as improved waveform quality and reduced harmonic distortion, even in low-voltage, high-power applications, without requiring additional hardware. A tailored modulation scheme is developed for the proposed interleaved architecture and is thoroughly explained in the paper. Additionally, a comprehensive comparative analysis is conducted, evaluating the proposed topology against the conventional configuration in terms of the number of output voltage levels and harmonic content in the output voltage and current, while maintaining a fixed number of submodules. Experimental results validate the performance and feasibility of the proposed interleaved converter and its associated modulation strategy. Although the study focuses on a single-phase implementation, the approach can be seamlessly extended to three-phase systems with minimal modifications.

This paper investigates how circular economy strategies can extend the operational life of a modular dual active bridge (DAB) electric vehicle (EV) charger beyond what reliability studies predict. Two power-sharing strategies (PSSs) are analyzed for the same converter, with identical system efficiency and similar overall system lifetime. However, these two PSSs lead to significantly different DAB-level lifetime predictions. A circularity assessment is performed for both PSSs, focusing on the medium-long loops of the circular economy, namely refurbish, remanufacture, and repurpose. Lastly, a method is proposed to select the preferred PSS with the least environmental impact, based on the desired extended lifetime of the EV charger, which considers the market strategy adopted by the manufacturer.

The diffusion of electric mobility continues to grow, which requires that systems associated with electric vehicle (EV) charging keep up with this growth. Furthermore, it is important to continue the technological development of such systems to respond to faster and more efficient charging, to enrich the user experience. Aligned with such perspective, this paper proposes a modular interleaved-based DC-DC converter topology for electric vehicles fast chargers. The proposed DC-DC converter topology is based on a set of configurable DC-DC power modules with independent power inputs and single parallel power output. It is proposed to be used in high-charging power stations, with internal configuration based on multiple isolated DC-DC power conversion stages, where the proposed modular DC-DC converter topology is connected to perform the DC interface directly with the EV battery. With the proper control, the proposed modular DC-DC topology operates in interleaved-based strategy, ensuring a split current among the DC-DC modules, and a reduced ripple in the output current, despite not being a native interleaved topology. The output ripple current of each DC-DC module presents a frequency that matches twice the switching frequency. The results presented in this paper validate the proposed modular DC-DC topology, as well as the proposed control for steady- and transient-state.

This paper deals with a three-phase, four-leg, front-end converter for a double stage charger in electric vehicle (EV) applications. The considered topology is examined along with its operating principle. This front-end converter arrangement allows employing EV chargers as local, distributed power conditioner, while recharging EV battery. A three-refer-ence frame, current controller has been implemented to deal with balanced and unbalanced ac-link currents, according to the smart grid demanding. The ac-current and dc-voltage ripples have been analyzed with regard to centered pulse-width modulation strategy. Analytical investigations have been verified by numerical simulations held in Matlab/Simulink environment.

During the last 4-5 years the plug in electrical vehicle market has known a tremendous growth, only in 2017 307400 units were sold, representing an increase of 39%. The battery management system and the battery charger are two of the most demanding systems in terms of required computational power added to this type of vehicles. Also, features related to driving automation, safety and comfort are becoming more complex, therefore a higher level of integration is necessary. The objective of this paper is to integrate an intelligent wireless battery management system into the same system on chip as the battery charger and to prove that a single IC can parallelize and coordinate all tasks conventionally carried out by multiple dedicated processors. The proposed solution exhibits higher integration, improved balancing, increased reliability and extended range.

The way of implementing an adaptive maximum power point tracking algorithm for photovoltaic (PV) applications in a field programmable gate array (FPGA) is described in this paper. A dual Kalman filter allows estimating the settling time of the whole system, including the PV source and the dc/dc converter controlling the operating point thereof, so that the tracking algorithm self adapts its parameters to the actual weather conditions. The real-time identification need of this application requires an FPGA platform, so that the intrinsic algorithm parallelism is exploited and the execution time is reduced. The tradeoff solutions proposed in this paper, accounting for the algorithm complexity and the limited FPGA hardware, as well as some solutions for optimizing the implementation are described. The proposed adaptive algorithm is implemented in a low-cost Xilinx Spartan-6 FPGA and it is validated through experimental tests.

One of the main functions any photovoltaic system is equipped with is the maximum power point tracking. The perturb and observe technique is one of the mainly used algorithms for tracking the optimal operating point of the photovoltaic source. Its performances depend on the values of the two design parameters, that are the amplitude and the frequency of the perturbations it applies for identifying the position of the maximum power point. In this paper, two methods for an on-line optimization of the perturbation period are presented. They are based on the identification of the dc/dc converter, that controls the photovoltaic source, by means of its impulse and frequency response, both evaluated by using the cross-correlation method. Such methods, as well as the tracking algorithm, are effectively implemented by using a Field Programmable Gate Array. The feasibility of the proposed methods has been confirmed by Matlab simulations.