Design and Implementation of an On-Board Vehicle CHAdeMO Interface for Vehicle-to-Grid Applications

In the last decade, the number of Electric Vehicles (EVs) and Plug-in Hybrid Electric Vehicles (PHEVs) have increased significantly. EVs and PHEVs will play an important role in the future of smart grid technology by storing the surplus energy in batteries and feeding it back into the distribution network when needed. Currently, only those EVs and PHEVs, which are equipped with the Japanese CHAdeMO standard (e.g. Nissan, Mitsubishi and Kia), are capable of feeding energy back into the electric grid. In order to enable Vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) functionality for already existing EVs and PHEVs, which cannot feed energy back into the distribution network, CTC cartech company designed and implemented the Vehicle CHAdeMO Interface (VCI) prototype, which fully implements the physical and protocol level of the CHAdeMO standard and manages the communication between the vehicle and the charger. The aim of this paper is to show the design, implementation and testing of the VCI. Some experimental test results are also displayed which validate the performance of this prototype. The significant advantage of VCI is that it can be installed in an EV or a PHEV without performing drastic changes in the already existing vehicle's Battery Management System (BMS) and it also allows bidirectional charging/discharging operation.