Assessment of a battery charger for electric vehicles with reactive power control

摘要

Batteries of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Plug-inHybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) have a large potential notonly to provide energy for the locomotion of these vehicles, butalso to interact, in dynamic way, with the power grid. Thereby,through the energy stored in the batteries, these vehicles can beused to regulate the active and the reactive power, as localEnergy Storage Systems. This way, EVs can contribute to helpthe power grid to regulate the active and reactive power flow inorder to stabilize the production and consumption of energy.For this propose should be defined usage profiles, controlled bya collaborative broker, taking into account the requirements ofthe power grid and the conveniences of the vehicle user. Besides,the interface between the power grid and the EVs, instead ofusing typical power converters that only work on unidirectionalmode, need to use bidirectional power converters to charge thebatteries (G2V - Grid-to-Vehicle mode) and to deliver part ofthe stored energy in the batteries back to the power grid (V2G -Vehicle-to-Grid mode). With the bidirectional power convertertopology presented in this paper, the consumed current issinusoidal and it is possible to regulate the power factor tocontrol the reactive power, aiming to contribute to mitigatepower quality problems in the power grid. To assess thebehavior of the presented bidirectional power converter underdifferent scenarios, are presented some computer simulationsand experimental results obtained with a prototype that wasdeveloped to be integrated in an Electric Vehicle.