A Gradient-Descent Optimization Assisted Gray-Box Impedance Modeling of EV Chargers

Extracting an electric vehicle (EV) charger's input impedance with the analytical model (white-box approach) or the frequency sweep (black-box approach) is limited by the parameter confidentiality or the measurement noise, respectively. To overcome these challenges, a gradient-descent (GD) optimization-based gray-box modeling approach is proposed. To start with, a sensitivity study on the analytical impedance model of an EV charger with a typical controller is carried out to identify the influential frequency range per controller and circuit parameter. On top of that, given an EV charger with unknown control and circuit information, a GD optimization-based algorithm for multiple parameter estimation is designed to identify the unknown controller and circuit parameters based on the measured impedance, by assuming the EV charger is using the typical controller. Then, an analytical input impedance of the black-box EV charger can be obtained. Moreover, the low-accuracy issue commonly encountered when estimating multiple parameters with GD optimization is mitigated with the proposed algorithm. Compared to pure frequency sweep, the proposed approach achieves a higher accuracy for the coupling impedance and a comparable accuracy for the diagonal impedance. The effectiveness of the proposed approach is validated by experimental results.