Design of a Pulsed Charger Employing Active Ripple Energy Compensation for Electric Vehicle Batteries

Pulsed Charging (PC) has recently gained attention as a promising alternative to conventional charging methods due to its potential benefits for battery lifetime extension. The DC/DC converter must be in fact designed to manage the required current pulses, where the instantaneous output power might be much higher than the average power. Correspondingly, its input power should be constant to avoid any pulsation being fed back to the power source, i.e., the grid. Conventionally, bulky storage capacitor at the input side of the DC/DC converter adopted to manage the instantaneous power imbalance, resulting an increase in size, volume and cost. In this work, an Active Ripple Energy Compensator (AREC) is proposed, which connected directly at the DC/DC converter output, i.e., across the battery. Since the storage capacitor is not directly connected to the output, the required storage capacitance can be drastically reduced by intentionally increasing its voltage ripple. Moreover, the proposed PC system is capable of managing a wide output voltage range <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\mathbf{2 0 0} V \sim \mathbf{9 2 0} V$</tex> to support various battery technologies. Concept, design, and simulation are provided to validate the proposed method and highlight its advantages over conventional solutions.