A Novel 1-ϕ Cuk Based On-Board EV Charger with Minimal Power Components

This paper proposes a novel 1-ϕ, Cuk based on-board electric vehicle (EV) charger with least power components. The proposed EV charger has a special feature to achieve power factor correction (PFC) at AC grid without requirement of the grid voltage and current sensors which cuts the cost and increases the power density of the EV charger along with robustness to noise. The automatic PFC at AC grid is accomplished by operating the output DC inductor in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM). The proposed EV charger necessitates a minimal number of power components for positive and negative half cycles of AC grid which improves the overall efficiency of the system. This is possible due to the combination of inverting and non-inverting Cuk converters are used for each half cycle of the AC grid. Further, the presence of output inductor in the EV charger reduces the ripples in the output current which is not common with all the existing chargers in the literature. In addition, the control of charger is simple, and easy to implement with only battery current sensor based current control. The proposed charger configuration has lower voltage stress across the power switches and diodes in comparison with the existing charger configurations. The theoretical concept is validated through experimental studies which prove the superior execution of PFC control of the 2kW EV charger. The various performance factors such as power factor at AC grid is 0.996 and total harmonic distortion (THD) in the AC grid current is 2.8% which are within the limits of standard IEC 61000-3-2.