Half-bridge bidirectional DC-DC Converter for small Electric Vehicle

This paper describes a bidirectional DC-DC converter for a small electric vehicle. The DC-DC converter designed and tested is capable of raising the voltage from the battery pack (96 V nominal) to 600 V necessary to feed the variable frequency drive that controls the induction motor. This converter is also capable of working in the opposite direction (600 V to 96 V) in order to capture energy from regenerative braking and downhill driving. Since our EV is designed to have multiple energy sources - batteries, supercapacitor and solar panels - this same converter will be used in parallel, one for each source, having thus a multiple power converter.