Dual mode control of an integrated on-board charger powered BLDC drive

Abstract

The high adoption of electric vehicles in transportation has created a demand for compact, efficient, and cost-effective charging solutions for them. Conventional onboard chargers are often bulky, which adds to the overall cost of the drive system, whereas off-board charging infrastructure remains limited. In order to address these issues, this work illustrates the design and modelling of an active power factor corrected integrated onboard charger which gets reconfigured from the electric vehicle drive train components. The proposed circuit setup is designed to work in dual mode, i.e., in the role of a DC-DC converter while charging the vehicle battery and as a three-phase inverter while driving the vehicle. The front-end power factor correction circuit, in addition to the reconfigured DC-DC converter, charges the 24 V, 20 Ah lead acid battery under constant current constant voltage (CC-CV) mode, achieving a power factor close to unity. Modelling and control of the proposed 200 W reconfigurable converter-fed 24 V, 180 W brushless direct current (BLDC) drive is validated using MATLAB/ Simulink Software. Simulation results demonstrate a power factor of 0.996 in grid-connected operation with a total harmonic distortion (THD) of 4.96%. The proposed architecture achieves a compact structure with only 8 switches enabling charging, propulsion and regenerative braking operation. The proposed converter thus contributes to a cost-effective electric vehicle and provides the scope of future extension to vehicle to home (V2H), vehicle to load (V2L), and vehicle to vehicle (V2V) applications as well.