Electric vehicle (EV) adoption continues to rise, yet EV sales still represent a small portion of vehicle sales in most countries. An expansion of the DC fast charging (DCFC) network is likely to accelerate this revolution towards sustainable transportation, giving drivers more flexible options for charging on longer trips. However, DCFC presents a large load on the grid which can lead to costly grid reinforcements and high monthly operating costs – adding energy storage to the DCFC station can help mitigate these challenges.
This thesis first performs a comprehensive review of DCFC stations with energy storage, including motivation, architectures, power electronic converters, and detailed simulation analysis for various charging scenarios. The review is closely tied to current state-of-the-art technologies and covers both academic research contributions and real energy storage projects in operation around the world. It is identified that the battery energy storage systems (BESSs) with active front end converter provides high efficiency with reasonable power density in a DCFC station. It is also realized that the isolated DC/DC converter interfacing BESS and EV determines the overall efficiency of a DCFC station with a low grid connection.
Secondly, this thesis analyzes the impact of active front end based DCFC stations connected to a grid distorted with background voltage harmonics. In active front end based DCFC stations, background voltage harmonics produce current not only at the frequencies of the distorted voltage, but also at other coupled frequencies. Various mitigation techniques, such as increasing inner control loop gain, grid voltage feedforward, and selective harmonic compensation, have been adopted in industry to reduce the emissions originating from distorted background voltage. However, although these techniques are effective in suppressing the current at the harmonic orders present in the background voltage, they deteriorate the emission at coupled frequencies. This thesis provides the theoretical explanation of this phenomenon, which is verified by simulation of a two-level active front end in PSCAD/EMTDC. This thesis also discusses the proper treatment of current emission due to background voltage harmonics.
Thirdly, the thesis identifies the semi dual active bridge (semi-DAB) converter as an ideal candidate as the interfacing isolated DC/DC converter between the BESS and the BEV. A novel control strategy is proposed for the semi-DAB converter to achieve wide voltage gain while increasing the efficiency at operational points with high input voltage and low output voltage, which is a commonly occurring scenario when the BESS is fully charged, and the EV battery is at low charge. Furthermore, this thesis also provides an algorithm to determine the required phase-shift in real time for any operating point, eliminating the need to devise the control trajectory offline. A 550 V, 10 kW experimental prototype is built and tested to validate the proposed control strategy. With a 25 A constant charging current, the prototype shows the proposed control strategy can improve efficiency by up to 3.5% compared to the well-known dual phase shift control at operating points with high input voltage (450 – 550 V) and low output voltage (150 – 275 V), with a peak efficiency of 97.6%.
Finally, this thesis proposes a novel variable turns-ratio semi-DAB converter to improve its overall efficiency even further when the input voltage is high and the output voltage is low. Furthermore, a control law is also proposed to determine the turns-ratio, i.e., the operational structure of the converter, which reduces the converter peak and rms current. The 550 V, 10 kW prototype is modified to accommodate the variable turns-ratio high frequency transformer to test the proposed converter and control. The proposed converter with control can further improve the efficiency at many operating points compared to single turns-ratio semi-DAB with DPS control. The peak efficiency achieved is 98.5%. / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:mcmaster.ca/oai:macsphere.mcmaster.ca:11375/27731 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Rafi, Md Ahsanul Hoque |
| Contributors | Bauman, Jennifer, Electrical and Computer Engineering |
| Source Sets | McMaster University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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