On-board electric vehicle battery charger with improved power quality and reduced switching stress

Development of charging infrastructure is one of the key factors for the successful operation of electric vehicles. This study proposes a power converter for on-board electric vehicle battery charger suitable with universal input voltage (85-265 V). The proposed converter is able to make better power quality by the reduction in total harmonic distortion (THD) of supply current, power factor correction and accurate output voltage regulation. System configuration includes diode bridge rectifier followed by three-level DC-DC SEPIC converter which emphasises on the reduction of voltage stress and switching loss across switches, thereby reduces the switch rating and improves the overall efficiency of the converter. The converter employs a duty cycle feed-forward controller scheme for charging the battery at constant voltage (CV) and constant current (CC) mode. Incorporating the above-said controller scheme has benefits of low THD in supply current, make power factor unity and nearly no zero-crossing detection. The proposed power factor correction converter system analysis is executed in continuous conduction mode. The system performance is evaluated with 400 V, 48 AH battery charging under CV and CC mode through MATLAB/Simulink and experimentation. To estimate the features of power quality indices like power factor and THD is recorded under the wide range of supply variations.