Power Electronics—EV Battery Charging

Growing worldwide demand of electric vehicles (EV) to curtail air pollution and steep fuel price rise is drawing prime attention of EV manufacturers towards improving the performance of EV battery chargers. Modern EV chargers are intended to be small sized, lightweight, efficient and cost effective. Bidirectional chargers have the additional provisions of feeding the battery stored energy back to the grid to meet the power demand in peak hours. All EV battery chargers essentially use power electronic converters as the main power processing unit. Power electronic researchers are therefore trying to develop new topologies of power electronic converters to meet the demands of modern EV battery chargers. This chapter elaborates power system layouts of EV battery charging systems, different categories of power electronic converters for such applications and working principles of basic power electronic converters. At last, several new topologies of recently developed power converters with many of the features mentioned above have been presented and explained briefly.