Real-Time Simulation of Efficient Energy Management Algorithms for Electric Vehicle Chargers

Abstract

Transportation electrification is happening at a rapid pace around the globe in response to the climate change mitigation measures taken by the regulatory agencies to curb tailpipe emissions. As the electric vehicle technology evolved, the size of on-board storage units has increased, which require charging from an external energy source. Renewable charging of electric vehicles is an attractive option to reduce the carbon footprint of an electric vehicle. The intermittent nature of the renewables necessitates a storage unit to provide continuous power. With a battery complementing solar generation, a power converter is deployed to interface these sources and storage units with the electric vehicle for charging. The converter shall now have to operate to quench the charging requirements by sourcing power from solar generation and storage elements. The converter also has to capture the generated solar power during the non-charging period and store it in the battery. All these functional requirements demand a robust energy management strategy to utilize all available sources and storage units efficiently without compromising load requirements. A Stateflow-based energy management algorithm for a three-port converter is proposed in this work. The proposed algorithm is implemented using OPAL-RT, and the real-time simulation results are presented.