Investigation On WBG Power Devices Inside Bidirectional PFC in On-Board Charger Applications

The request of Active Front End (AFE) converters with bidirectional functionality is growing at high rate. This is due to the fast development of smart charging infrastructures related to Car Electrification process and V2G applications inside the Smart Grid. Such power converters are required to provide high performance with high efficiency and overall low complexity. A viable approach to this purpose is the introduction of WBG power devices. In this paper, an overview of active front-end PFC stage for typical 3-phase application is proposed. In particular, a 2-level three-phase full bridge (B6) and a 3-level NPC2 (3L-TType) converters are considered and the opportunity to extend the performance is analyzed. A hybrid WBG implementation, with both SiC and Gan technology are compared in order to highlight the benefits of those technology in 3L-TType configuration.