A Power Quality Improved EV Charger with Bridgeless Cuk Converter

A bridgeless Cuk converter based EV (Electric Vehicle) battery charger is designed and developed in this work. It provides low cost and high power density based charging solution for EV. This charger incorporates less number of devices operating over one switching cycle, which reduces the additional conduction loss incurred by a diode bridge rectifier of conventional charger and hence, improves the charger efficiency. During constant current and constant voltage regions, the commands for battery charging, are synchronized by a flyback converter. The proposed charger draws a sinusoidal current from AC mains along with the total harmonic distortion (THD) in supply current is reduced to the limits as per the IEC 61000-3-2 standard. The proposed charger is designed in discontinuous conduction mode (DCM) with the desirable inherent zero current switching operation and low reverse recovery losses in circuit diodes. The proposed charger is tested to demonstrate the improved power quality. Test results confirm the improved performance of the proposed charger.