A Single-Stage Isolated High Power Factor AC-DC Converter based Battery Charger for Light Electric Vehicles

A single-stage isolated high power factor and high gain AC-DC converter is used to devise a light electric vehicle (LEV) battery charger in this study. The AC-DC converter, used to develop the presented charger, offers several advantages in important performance criteria viz power factor correction (PFC), efficiency and cost. The charger operates at a high power factor by virtue of integral PFC feature of the converter due to operation in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM). DCM operation also offers additional advantages of simplification of control algorithm and reduction in number of sensors, which leads to overall reduction in effort of implementation when compared to continuous conduction mode (CCM). The charger comprises a converter developed by integration of boost and flyback converter and has the property of continuous input current. When compared with two-stage battery chargers, the presented charger offers several advantages viz lower component count, higher efficiency, reduced cost, more compact size, simplified control and superior dynamic regulation. In this paper, the feasibility and performance analysis of the presented approach are verified by the means of simulation for a 0.5 kW charger.