An Isolated Bidirectional Integrated Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicle Battery Charger with Resonant Converters

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles draw electricity from the electrical grid and store energy in their batteries. To increase charge availability for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, on-board chargers can be used, which should be small in size and lightweight. In this article, an on-board bidirectional soft-switched battery charger is proposed that utilizes a phase-shift-controlled dual-bridge series resonant converter with isolation. The bidirectional characteristic of proposed charger makes it suitable for vehicle-to-grid operation (i.e., injecting power from the vehicle to the grid) in smart grids. A switching control scheme is also proposed to provide soft-switching operation for all semiconductor switches, resulting in high efficiency for the charger. In this structure, the conventional bulky capacitor of the DC link is eliminated. In addition, the proposed charger can integrate the hardware of the traction system; hence, the size of the whole charger-inverter system will be drastically decreased. The appropriate performance of the proposed charger is verified by simulation and experimental results.