A Contribution to Protective Measures Against Electric Shock at DC Charging Stations

With the steadily increasing number of electric vehicles on the market and the associated, ever-growing charging infrastructure, more and more questions regarding the measures against electric shock as well as the verification of charging stations for electric vehicles arise. The installation, the operation as well as the electrical safety especially of DC charging stations is not yet fully standardized respectively regulated. The focus of this paper is on the protective measures against electric shock or in detail on the initial and periodic verification of DC charging stations for electric vehicles. As a first step, the most important legal regulations as well as international standards applicable to charging stations are summarized. Based on this, measurement results including corresponding analyses of various DC charging processes of charging stations of two manufacturers in normal operation and during an event of a fault are compared and documented. In summary, it can be seen that the analyzed DC charging stations do not always react identically with regard to their switch-off behavior or their switch-off times to different fault scenarios.