Abstract

This paper presents an on-board bidirectional battery charger for Electric Vehicles (EVs), which operates in three different modes: Grid-to- Vehicle (G2V), Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G), and Vehicle-to-Home (V2H). Through these three operation modes, using bidirectional communications based on Information and Communication Technologies (ICT), it will be possible to exchange data between the EV driver and the future smart grids. This collaboration with the smart grids will strengthen the collective awareness systems, contributing to solve and organize issues related with energy resources and power grids. This paper presents the preliminary studies that results from a PhD work related with bidirectional battery chargers for EVs. Thus, in this paper is described the topology of the on-board bidirectional battery charger and the control algorithms for the three operation modes. To validate the topology it was developed a laboratory prototype, and were obtained experimental results for the three operation modes. FEDER Funds, through the Operational Programme for Competitiveness Factors – COMPETE, and by National Funds through FCT – Foundation for Science and Technology of Portugal, under the project FCOMP-01-0124- FEDER-022674, and QREN project AAC n.º36/SI/2009 – 13844 Document type: Part of book or chapter of book

Abstract

Recently, the use of renewable energy sources (RES) and electric vehicles (EVs) has been rapidly increased worldwide. As a result of the highly fluctuating nature of RES, the charging and discharging rates of EVs significantly have to be increased, and so the lifespan of EV batteries decreases. In this paper, an optimization-based method is proposed to smooth voltage fluctuations due to various RES types by optimally controlling the charging and discharging power of EVs and the reactive power of the RES inverters. To extend the lifespan of the EV battery, EV power fluctuations and their minimum preset state of charge (SOC) are considered in the proposed optimization model. For this purpose, a new multi-objective function is formulated, including (1) voltage fluctuations, (2) EV power fluctuations, and (3) the deviation of SOC of EVs from their minimum desired level. The use of the hull moving average (HMA) is proposed to mitigate voltage fluctuations, which eliminates the lag problem of the widely used movingaverage methods. The gravitational search algorithm (GSA) is utilized to accurately solve the optimization model. The simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method to smooth voltage fluctuations while considering degradation and charging plan of EV batteries. Peer reviewed