Bridge-less PFC isolated 99% efficiency capable charger

Arlo1

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Many of you know I built my own electric car with a Nissan leaf motor and a controller designed around lebowski's brain and inverter stage designed with help from many on this forum.

I am currently adding 20kwh more battery for a total of 30.5kwh of usable energy. I want to do real road trips with this like drive down the coast to the Bay area. That will require the fastest charging possible. So I set out to learn how to make a charger. After a couple weeks of studying and searching around online I stumbled across this link. http://powerelectronics.com/site-files/powerelectronics.com/files/archive/powerelectronics.com/images/SingleStagePFCconverter.pdf

Slobodan Ćuk Who goes by TESLAco http://teslaco.com/ and has a few quite informative videos on youtube as well. Seems like he is on to something.

He points out it doesn't make sense for the charger to run any sort of decent current to be bigger then the more powerful 3 phase inverter in the EV.

So I used his basic idea to prove the concept will work with a few parts I had kicking around and it seems like it will work. Next I will set up a proper power switch and pwm it with an arduino.

FInding a Bridgeless PFC IC seems like a challange but its easy to use a couple diodes and a voltage divider to send a imput to the PFC.


For now here is a quick test I run this morning.

[youtube]TqKPaOldDhI[/youtube]
 
Managed to move forward with some testing today.

[youtube]EPFc6I5ljh8[/youtube]
 
Hi guys I have been working on this again. I have a version with the diodes and cap removed out of the out put stage that I am setting up to run the ceramic heater elements in my car. The Goal is to run the 470v max battery voltage into the converter then have a current controlled and Isolated output going to the heater elements in the car. This keeps the voltage from the main battery pack out of the car. On the Lt spice models it shows 99% efficiency possible.

Once I am finished this I hope to get back on the charger.

[youtube]Su6ZWSjihRM[/youtube]
 
Looking around to find out what "bridge-less PFC" was, I found this which questions the benefits of bridge-less.

I'm not competent to judge, but you might find it useful. Or not.
 
Goal is to reduce charger size and weight. Right now chargers are ~ 10x of a inverter that drives the motor.....
 
Most chargers today take a Rube Goldberg approach to getting power out of the wall and into your battery. Huge room for improvement going to a topology with so many less power transfer stages.

I would love to be able it have my 22kW of onboard DSR charging power in a package that doesn't effect my ground clearance (right now 11kW is in the tank area and 11kW mounted below).
 
This is probably a dumb idea, but would it be possible to design a drive controller that also operates as a charger?

Put AC back in the same way that Regen does?
 
wiredsim said:
This is probably a dumb idea, but would it be possible to design a drive controller that also operates as a charger?

Put AC back in the same way that Regen does?
Adappto does that.
 
Yes I can already use the controller from my CRX to Regen into the battery or buffer the grid.... The problem is I would need 480v 3 phase hooked up to any place I plan to charge at.

Most EV charging stations are 240v single phase
 
wiredsim said:
This is probably a dumb idea, but would it be possible to design a drive controller that also operates as a charger?

Put AC back in the same way that Regen does?

The Renault Zoe also uses the inverter as fast battery charger. Don't know anything about its detailed implementation.
 
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