Designing an On-board Charger to Efficiently Charge Multiple Electric Vehicles

Abstract

An on-board charger for efficiently charging multiple battery-operated electric vehicles (EVs) is introduced. It has evolved as a single-input dual-output (SIDO) integrated boost-single ended primary inductor converter (SEPIC) fly-back converter, offering cost-effectiveness, reliability, and higher efficiency compared to conventional chargers with equivalent specifications. The proposed system includes an additional regulated output terminal, in addition to an existing terminal for charging the EV battery of a 4-wheeler, which can be used to charge another EV battery, preferably a 2-wheeler. With the aid of control techniques, unity power factor operations are obtained during constant-voltage (CV)/constant-current (CC) charging for the grid-to-vehicle (G2V) operating mode. Using mathematical modelling analysis, the proposed system is developed in a Matlab/Simulink environment, and the results are validated in a real-time simulator using dSPACE-1104. The proposed system is employed for charging the batteries of two EVs with capacities of 400 V, 40 A · h and 48 V, 52 A · h for the 4-wheeler and 2-wheeler, respectively. Its performance is investigated under different operating modes and over a wide range of supply voltage variations to ensure safe and reliable operation of the charger.