Novel Reconfigurable Power Converters Facilitating Dual Battery Integration in Electric Vehicles

Battery-operated Electric Vehicles (EVs) are experiencing a significant surge in demand in today's market. The primary obstacles to the growth of the EV industry include concerns about range anxiety and reliability. To address these challenges, Dual battery-based solutions are emerging as a recent trend in the EV, specifically the two-wheeler segment. This paper introduces two novel reconfigurable power converters that enable dual battery integration. The converters can connect the dual batteries in series or in parallel or allow using a single battery during traction or charging. The output terminals of the converters can be directly connected to the charger or traction inverter. To connect dual batteries in parallel with minimum circulating currents, the terminal potentials must be nearly equal. The proposed converters include a voltage balancing feature to ensure this balance. To demonstrate dual battery charging, the proposed converter is integrated into a non-isolated inverter charger system (ICS). Transfer functions for the system with the proposed converter have been derived using state space averaging and small signal modeling, and the necessary controllers have been designed using the K-factor approach. Comprehensive MATLAB simulations and hardware experiments are presented to validate the effectiveness of the proposed power converters.