Design and Development of Bridge-less PFC Converter based EV charger

Electric vehicles (EVs) plays an important role in reducing the impact of the transportation sector on environmental pollution issues. Among EVs, Battery Electric Vehicles (BEVs) are in prominent use. When the battery chargers of these BEVs are connected to the grid to charge the batteries, they must have high efficiency with unity power factor operation (UPF) to improve the charging time and life of the battery without affecting the grid power quality. Hence, a high-performance Power Factor Correction (PFC) converter must be used at the front end of the charger to meet the input current harmonic limits set by international standards. In this paper, a bridge-less modified Cuk-based EV charger is presented. The main advantages of this charger are reduced input current harmonics, lower output voltage ripple, decreased component size, and lesser voltage stress on switches. This off-board EV charger has two stages including a front-end PFC converter and back-end isolated stage. This topology reduces THD of the overall system and also ensures the unity power factor operation. The designed converter is modeled and its performance is validated using MATLAB/Simulink. The result analysis shows that the system operates at UPF with an input current THD of 2.23%.