Examination and experimental comparison of dc/dc buck converter topologies used in wireless electric vehicle charging applications

Abstract

The studies on Wireless Power Transfer (WPT) technology and peripherals in Electric Vehicle (EV) applications are intensifying. While the energy received from the WPT system is transferred to the EV battery, the direct current (dc)/dc converter circuits are used. The dc/dc buck converter topologies are one of them. The converter circuits must be highly efficient, lightweight, and compact to have a high range in EV vehicles. There are asynchronous buck, synchronous buck, and interleaved synchronous buck converter circuit topologies from the literature. In this study, the efficiency results of these circuit topologies were analyzed using MATLAB/Simulink and experimental studies. This study contributes to the literature by conducting circuit-level efficiency analysis and component-level power loss analysis. It has been observed that the interleaved synchronous buck converter circuit operates at 99% efficiency at 1066 W. In addition, it has been shared with the oscilloscope results that the current ripples of this circuit topology are lower than other circuit converters. Specifically, there has been a significant reduction of 56% in power losses, particularly in the interleaved synchronous buck converter (ISBC). This study analyzes the dynamic behavior of the dc/dc buck converter topologies, and results about their performance are given.