Advanced control of integrated chargers in electric vehicle application

<p>In the wake of rising climate concerns, there is a world-wide enthusiasm to transform the urban transportation into a zero emissions industry. However, the lack of battery charging infrastructure and the subsequent range-anxiety of the electric vehicles (EV) pose a threat to their large-scale deployment. Recently, the development of "integrated EV battery chargers" (IBCs) has shown promise to mitigate these issues. The so-called EV IBCs make use of the on-board EV drive circuit along with the propulsion motor windings for the purpose of battery charging, essentially eliminating the need for a dedicated charging infrastructure. In line with the pertinent development in this domain, the control design of EV IBCs is highly crucial to enabling their reliable operation. Due to a large number of control objectives such as power factor correction (PFC), constant current/constant voltage (CC/CV) charging, and state of charge (SoC) equalization, the control of EV IBCs becomes very challenging. Moreover, the high-level operational requirements such as the vehicle-to-grid (V2G), grid-to-vehicle (G2V), and vehicle-to-home (V2H) modes further complicate the control design process.</p> <p>This thesis aims to design multi-objective primary-level control architectures for the switched reluctance motor (SRM) based integrated EV battery chargers using advanced control methods. First, the polynomial-based control design using the cascade control architectures is discussed for the G2V operation of the SRM IBC. Secondly, the disturbance observer-based resonant control with intrinsic anti-windup property is addressed for the G2V and V2H modes of the EV IBC, respectively. Then, the multi-objective model predictive control (MPC) paradigm is explored with regards to its application to SRM based EV IBCs using both the finite and continuous control set MPC approach. In order to mitigate the well-known offset problem in the MPC, the internal model principle (IMP) based approaches are employed where a sinusoidal mode is embedded into the MPC to eliminate the steady-state error in presence of external disturbances. As a contribution of this work, the effect of the control-loop time-delay is thoroughly considered, and the digital anti-windup control implementation is provided for all control paradigms. A case-study is also conducted to compare the resonant control strategies for the V2G mode of an EV IBC with the polynomial-based control, the disturbance observer based control and the IMP based repetitive control.</p>