A Solar PV-Based Compact EV Charging Solution for On-Board Applications

This work is focused on a solar photovoltaics (PV)-based onboard charger using reconfigured motor windings. In the proposed scheme, the motor windings and traction converter switches form a three-phase interleaved buck converter (IBC). The IBC is interfaced with the solar PV and acts as the maximum power point tracking converter. The IBC reduces the current ripple at the battery side and improves the battery cycle life. Through IBC, a large amount of current at the battery side is paralleled in three inductors of the IBC, which reduces the <sc xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">on</small>-state losses in the switches and copper loss in the inductors. Therefore, it is possible to increase the power level of the onboard charging system as high as that of the propulsion system with enhanced compactness of the system while reducing the cost. Moreover, the applied control strategy reduces the current sensor requirements in IBC and eliminates the proportional–integral controller, which is another major advantage of the proposed system compared to conventional control of the IBC. Furthermore, the switches are subjected to zero current switching. Finally, the real-time experiment of the proposed system was accomplished using the OPAL-RT platform for 6 kW of charging power.