A High Efficiency On-board Charger for Solar Powered Electric Vehicles Using a Novel Dual-output DC-DC Converter

Abstract

Solar powered electric vehicles (SPEVs) charge their energy storages from photovoltaic (PV) panels via on-board charger. The battery charger for these vehicles is mainly dependent on the DC-DC stage. Accordingly, this paper proposes an on-board battery charger utilizing a novel dual-output isolated DC-DC converter to charge battery and supercapacitor (SC) simultaneously. This topology uses impedance quasi-Z source network and also integrates both switched-capacitors and coupled-inductor techniques to achieve higher voltage gain ratio. Furthermore, compared to the traditional battery chargers, due to the use of only two switches, the number of components, the system size and the corresponding cost can be reduced. The results obtained by computer simulation demonstrate that the high voltage gain is obtained for both battery and SC ports at lower values of duty ratio with an efficiency of more than 94.5%. Finally, experiments with a 150W prototype are demonstrated in the laboratory to investigate the performance and effectiveness of the proposed SPEVs charger.