Study, modelling and control of bidirectional battery chargers for real-time simulation applications

Abstract

The work done in this project aims to propose a suitable AC-DC converter topology and control method for high power, bidirectional battery chargers. Moreover, another objective is to design equivalent converter models suitable for real-time simulation applications. This research is motivated by the growing presence of electric vehicles and the increasing demand for faster and bidirectional battery chargers. In addition to high power density and bidirectional power flow capability, the converter used in the battery charger should offer good power quality. Therefore, this thesis studies two multilevel converter topologies, which are able to minimize harmonic distortion on the grid due to their high number of output voltage levels. Thus, the single-phase 23-level H-PUC is proposed with a model predictive controller. By implementing this converter in real-time simulation using the RT-LAB software and OP4510 simulator, it is shown that the topology greatly reduces the AC current filtering requirements when compared to conventional converter topologies. Then, a deadbeat predictive controller for bidirectional power flow is developed for the three-phase PM-ANPC 13-level converter. Simulation results obtained in Simulink demonstrate that the proposed controller can effectively regulate the AC current and DC link voltage during both charging and discharging modes of operation. Finally, an equivalent model of the PM-ANPC converter is presented and validated against a reference model that uses blocks from the SimPowerSystems library in Simulink. Then, an OP4510 real-time simulator is used to illustrate the improved simulation performance of the equivalent model with respect to the reference model.

Date	20 Jul 2021
Original language	American English
Awarding Institution	École de technologie supérieure
Supervisor	Kamal Al-Haddad (Supervisor)