A Combinatory AC and DC Charging Approach for Electric Vehicles

Reducing the battery charging time of an electric vehicle (EV) is one of the key factors to boost the widespread adoption of EVs. The commercial, off-board high power, dc fast charging station need high initial investment and maintenance cost. On the other hand, the standard on-board type-1 and type-2 ac chargers with 3.3kW to 19kW need long time to charge. This paper proposes a combinatory ac and dc charging approach to increase the charging rate of EV batteries. The proposed combinatory charging approach provides a technique to charge EV battery from the on-board type-2 ac charger and drivetrain integrated dc charger. For drivetrain integrated dc charging, a dc input port (N (+),O(-) is formed using the neutral of the EV motor winding N and negative rail of the drivetrain inverter (O). Through this dc input port, power from the renewable energy source-based dc microgrids, solar rooftops and other EV battery can be accepted for charging. The EV drivetrain inverter is controlled as an integrated interleaved dc-dc converter (IDC) to receive power from dc sources with EV motor windings reutilized as filter inductors. The control scheme for regulating the voltage across common dc-link accepting power from type-2 ac charger and integrated interleaved dc charger is presented. The performance analysis of EV motor and drivetrain integrated DC charger is validated through Finiet Element methods (FEM) co-simulation using Ansys Maxwell and Simplorer. A scaled experimental prototype is developed to validate the proposed combined ac and dc charging approach.