Hundreds kW Charging Stations for e-Buses Operating Under Regular Ultra-Fast Charging

A natural evolution in public transportation vehicles is the development toward electric-driven buses (e-buses). Battery weight and volume is still a challenge in the electrification of general-purpose vehicles, but the urban bus systems have some characteristics that can be explored to address such issues. In particular, the predefined routes and stops create opportunities for reduction of onboard storage capacity through regular ultra-fast charging (R-UFC), based on chargers installed next to the boarding stations. This paper proposes a power architecture for UFC stations using the true unity power factor (TUPF) rectifier as the charger front end and interleaved dc–dc converters as the charger output. Both technologies contribute significantly to the reduction of filter components and assure high power quality standards. The proposed TUPF rectifier eliminates all harmonic orders up to the 50th, operates with low switching frequency, and does not require sinusoidal filters. The UFC stations are presented, and their investigation is carried on using computer simulations of a 400-kW application. The proposed concept is verified experimentally using a laboratory test setup.