Delivering Smooth Power to Pulse-Current Battery Chargers: Electric Vehicles as a Case in Point

Abstract

This article proposes a battery charger for electric vehicles based on pulse-current charging method which has great distinct advantages and substantially enhances charging process. It applies positive, negative, and zero currents for each cycle. On the one hand, drastic changes in the battery current and power during the cycles appear in the output of the battery charger, negatively affect the terminal, and frequently change the output active power. This condition is also important in battery chargers which do not have dc–ac stage and are powered by other power sources, for instance, fuel cell. On the other hand, the output active and reactive powers must track constant values without any variations for participation in vehicle-to-grid technology. Thus, a particular parallel battery–capacitor topology is suggested in practice and then an innovative control system is precisely designed in order to implement pulse-current method and transfer smooth power in the presence of the intrinsic drastic changes in the battery power. The proposed system is compared with the recent pulse-current battery chargers. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the solution. This article is accompanied by a PDF file demonstrating the details.