A SiC-Based High-Efficiency Isolated Onboard PEV Charger With Ultrawide DC-Link Voltage Range

In LLC-based onboard battery charging architectures used in plug-in electric vehicles (PEV), the dc link voltage can be actively regulated to follow the battery pack voltage so that the LLC converter can operate in proximity of resonant frequency and achieve high efficiencies over the wide range of battery pack voltage. However, conventional boost-type power factor correction (PFC) converters are unable to provide ultrawide dc link voltages since their output voltages should always be larger than their input voltages. This paper proposes a Silicon Carbide (SiC)-based onboard PEV charger using single-ended primary-inductor converter (SEPIC) PFC converter followed by an isolated LLC resonant converter. With the proposed charger architecture, the SEPIC PFC converter is able to provide an ultrawide range for dc link voltage, and consequently enhance the efficiency of the LLC stage by ensuring operation in proximity of resonant frequency. A 1-kW SiC-based prototype is designed to validate the proposed idea. The experimental result shows that the SEPIC PFC converter achieves unity power factor, 2.72% total harmonic distortion, and 95.3% peak conversion efficiency. The LLC converter achieves 97.1% peak efficiency and always demonstrates a very high efficiency across the ultrawide dc-link voltage range. The overall efficiency of the charger is 88.5% to 93.5% from 20% of the rated load to full load.