Design and control of bidirectional DC/AC and DC/DC converters for plug-in hybrid electric vehicles

Plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs) are specialized hybrid electric vehicles that have the potential to obtain enough energy for average daily commuting from batteries. These batteries would be charged from the power grid at home or at work and would thus allow for a reduction in the overall fuel consumption. This paper proposes an integrated power electronics interface for PHEVs, which consists of a novel Eight-Switch Inverter (ESI) and an interleaved DC/DC converter, in order to reduce the cost, the mass and the size of the power electronics unit (PEU) with high performance at any operating mode. In the proposed configuration, the Eight-Switch Inverter (ESI) is able to function as a bidirectional single-phase AC/DC battery charger/ vehicle to grid (V2G) and to transfer electrical energy between the DC-link and the electric traction system as DC/AC inverter. In addition, a bidirectional-interleaved DC/DC converter and its control are proposed for interfacing the ESI to a low-voltage battery pack in order to minimize the ripple of the battery current and to improve the efficiency of the DC system with lower inductor size. To validate the performance of the proposed configuration, the indirect field-oriented control (IFOC) based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) is proposed to optimize the efficiency of the AC drive system in PHEVs and compared with the IFOC. Moreover, an improved AC/DC controller based Proportional-Resonant Control (PRC) is proposed in order to reduce the THD of the input current in charger/V2G modes. The proposed configuration is analyzed and its performance is validated using simulated results obtained in MATLAB/ SIMULINK. Furthermore, the experimental setup of the integrated system is under progress.