A single-phase integrated bidirectional plug-in hybrid electric vehicle battery charger

Plug-In hybrid electric vehicles could be connected to the electrical grid to be recharged. To ease the charging process, one can use an on-board charger to charge the electric vehicle battery. The on-board charger should have small size and light weight. On the other hand, the charger should draw current at high power factor to maximize power from an outlet. Most of the existing battery chargers are unidirectional which cannot be used in smart grid for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) purpose. In this paper, a new bidirectional isolated soft-switched battery charger is proposed which is appropriate for vehicle to grid technology. This proposed structure shares the same hardware components which are used in motor-inverter for traction mode, therefore there is no additional components used and inverter/charger systems are integrated. Hence, the size of the whole charger/inverter will be decreased. This charger utilizes a phase-shift controlled dual bridge series resonant DC/DC converter which benefits isolation which is vital in terms of safety issues as well as soft-switching operation for its semiconductor switches. The appropriate performance of the proposed charger is investigated by simulation and experimental results.