A Multifunctional Current Fed Triple Active Bridge Converter for EV Application

On-board charger (OBC) and auxiliary power module (APM) are two major power electronic units in electric vehicles (EV). The OBC is the power electronic interface between the grid and the high-voltage (HV) battery. It has an AC-DC converter followed by an isolated DC-DC converter. The APM is an isolated dc-dc converter, is the interface between the HV battery and the low-voltage (LV) battery. The power density of such a configuration is poor due to the presence of multiple power electronic converters. In this paper, an integrated OBC and APM are designed to improve the power density. This solution employs a triple active bridge (TAB) converter, where the AC-DC converter is integrated as a current-fed structure within the converter. This current fed structure forms an interleaved boost converter which further reduces the size of the input inductor. Moreover, this converter has an in-built feature of second-order ripple power compensation (RPC) in the charge mode of EV, this reduces the number of power stages and improves the reliability of the converter. To analyze the performance of the proposed solution a 3.3 kW converter is designed and simulated using MATLAB/Simscape.