Novel Five-Level ANPC Bidirectional Converter for Power Quality Enhancement during G2V/V2G Operation of Cascaded EV Charger

This paper presents a novel single-phase (SP) active-neutral point clamped (ANPC) five-level bidirectional converter (FLBC) for enhancing the power quality (PQ) during the grid-to-vehicle (G2V) and vehicle-to-grid (V2G) operation of an electric vehicle (EV) charger connected in series. This EV charger is based on a dual-active half-bridge DC-DC converter (DAHBC) with a high frequency isolation transformer. Unlike the comparable ANPC topologies found in literature, the proposed one has two more switches, i.e., ten instead of eight. However, with the addition of these components, the proposed multilevel converter not only becomes capable of properly balancing the voltage of the DC-link split capacitors under various step-changing conditions but it achieves a better efficiency, a lower stress of the switching devices and a more even distribution of the power losses. The resulting grid-tied ANPC-SPFLBC and DAHBC are accurately controlled with a cascaded control strategy and a single-phase shift (SPS) control technique, respectively. The simulation results obtained with MATLAB-SimPowerSystems as well as the experimental results obtained in laboratory validate the proposed ANPC-SPFLBC for a set of exhaustive tests in both V2G and G2V modes. A detailed power quality analysis carried out with a Fluke 43B alike demonstrates the good performance of the proposed topology.

Automated summary

This paper introduces a novel single-phase active-neutral point clamped five-level bidirectional converter to enhance the power quality during grid-to-vehicle and vehicle-to-grid operation of an electric vehicle charger. Compared to existing ANPC topologies, the proposed structure includes two additional switches but achieves better voltage balancing, efficiency, stress reduction, and power loss distribution under various conditions.