Bidirectional Multilevel Universal Charger with Decentralized Control Structure for Powering Light Electric Mobility Applications

Electric Bicycles (E-bikes) are an emerging class of light electric mobility vehicles that enhance the urban transportation system in a highly efficient and green manner. Because of the compact dimension, an E-bike carries a small battery, which needs daily multiple charges. Thus, the growing number of E-bikes requires many private and public charging stations, which could be a direct source of distortion for the grid power quality and resiliency. The massive number of E-bikes however can be considered as an effective capacity to provide ancillary services for the grid. Accordingly, this paper introduces a Bidirectional Fast Charger (BFC) for E-bikes based on a new compact multilevel converter topology and an advanced hybrid controller. The proposed BFC supplies E-bikes with different voltage levels in charging mode and supports the grid with ancillary services using the stored energy of the battery during inverting mode. The presented implementation results collected in different test scenarios validate the feasibility of the proposed bidirectional multilevel fast charger for future industrialization.