A Modified Battery Charger with Power Factor Correction for Plug-in Electrical Vehicles

Abstract

Electrical vehicles are becoming famous worldwide having the striking benefits of improved energy efficiency and reduced carbon footprints etc. Plug-in Electrical Vehicles (PEVs) are powered by batteries and these batteries needs to be recharged after every usage cycle. These batteries are fully charged at terminal voltage of 420 V and the voltage drops to 300 V after the usage cycle. Therefore, these batteries would require a battery charger ranging from 300V-420V to fully charge the batteries. There are two type of on-board battery chargers, 1) Two-stage and single-stage chargers. The former has drawbacks of larger component count, larger size and lower efficiency. Hence, in this research project, a single-stage battery charger is proposed. The proposed charger consists of two integrated stages. The 1st stage is Power factor correction (PFC) converter and the later one is the LLC resonant DC-DC converter. Both of these stages are driven by a common half-bridge network. The proposed charger is designed for charging a 100 cell 3.2kW Lithium-ion battery. The operation and performance of the proposed charger is evaluated by Spice based computer simulation. The simulation results showed that the proposed charger can efficiently charge the battery from depleted state to fully charged state.