A soft-switching bridgeless AC-DC power factor correction converter for off-road and neighborhood electric vehicle battery charging

This paper presents a high efficiency, continuous conduction mode (CCM), zero voltage switching (ZVS) bridgeless AC-DC power-factor-correction (PFC) converter for neighborhood electric vehicle (NEV) battery charging. The converter operates in both pulse-width-modulation (PWM) mode and resonant mode each switching cycle and utilizes standard average-current-mode control. This new modulation technique is hereafter referred to as hybrid-resonant PWM (HRPWM). All the semiconductor devices of the proposed converter realize soft-switching, nearly eliminating all switching losses and reducing electromagnetic interference (EMI). Moreover, all the semiconductor devices can operate without voltage overstress for a wide universal AC input voltage range. The converter architecture exhibit low in-rush current and implementation of lightning and surge protection system is easy. The detailed operation of the proposed converter, along with the stress analysis of the circuit components, and detailed loss analysis are provided. The feasibility of the converter is confirmed by comparing an experimental prototype of the benchmark hard switched AC-DC boost converter. Through experimentation and analysis, the proposed converter can achieve a total loss reduction of 15 %, at 70 kHz switching frequency, 120 V input, and 400 V/650 W output in comparison to the benchmark AC-DC boost converter.