Investigation of Non-unity Power Factor Operation of 3-ph ZVS PFC Rectifier for On-Board Charging of Electric Vehicles

In this paper, an analysis and experimental eval-uation of a non-unity power-factor operation of a 3-ph soft-switched on-board charger (OBC) for electric vehicles (EV) is introduced. With deeper penetration of distributed energy resources (DER), it is envisioned that OBC manufacturers will need to provide static compensation functionality to support the electric grid, which results in non-unity power factor operation. Soft-switching techniques generally constrain the operating region of a converter. In this research, it is shown that the soft-switching PFC rectifier can sustain operation power factor of 0.9 with discontinuous pulse-width modulation (PWM) scheme and power factor of 0.8 with sinusoidal PWM scheme due to the soft-switching cell capacitor voltage trajectory.