An improved power quality based PFC converter for EV battery charger

An EV (Electric Vehicle) could play a prominent role in transport sector in terms of cost benefit and environment issues. A battery charger must have high efficiency and dependability with a unity power factor current drawn at its input AC mains since it is directly going to affect the charging time and life of the battery used in EV. Conventional AC-DC converter uses a diode bridge rectifier at the source side which is the main culprit for the bad power quality and poor power factor. The zeta converter is also a buck-boost converter with positive DC voltage at the output along with overcoming the limitation of the design complexity and cost issues of the later one. This topology also, offers low ripples in the output DC voltage. Therefore, in this paper, an isolated zeta PFC converter is cascaded to ensure the power quality indices within standard at the source side along with the unity power factor at AC mains. The converter is designed, modeled and its performance simulated in MATLAB/Simulink environment with an emulated resistive DC load and results are presented to demonstrate that the converter is performing satisfactorily to provide improved power quality as defined by the IEC standard for rated load and certain supply conditions.