A Plug - in Electric Vehicle (PEV) with Compact Bidirectional CuK Converter and Sturdier Induction Motor Drive

This paper proposes a CuK converter based integrated battery charger for plug-in electric vehicles (PEV) incorporating an induction motor (IM) drive in the propulsion system. IM drive is controlled with an advanced feed-forward field-oriented controlled (FFOC) in order to reduce the protuberance caused during load disturbance. Proposed bidirectional DC/DC converter is capable of performing buck/boost function during all modes of vehicle operation. It operates as a power factor correction (PFC) converter during plug-in charging mode, and as conventional single switch inverting buck/boost converter in driving and regenerative braking modes. In addition, size, weight and cost of the charger are also reduced, as it involves the minimum number of components compared to existing buck/boost converters used in chargers. Simulations are performed on MATLAB/Simulink environment and a laboratory prototype of the aforementioned converter has been built to validate its feasibility.