Energy management and control of EV charging

Part 1: Optimized Energy Management for Electric Vehicles and Infrastructure

Smart charging of an EV (figure 4) and the smart energy management of an EV fleet, considering the mobility constraints (desired SOC at the end of the charging and departure time), the temperature of the Li-ion batteries, the charging infrastructure, and the power grid, is the first part of this area. Algorithms developed have the advantage of increasing the estimation accuracy of final SOC in very low temperature, and to be embedded on the EV due to the low computational capacity of the algorithms and the speed of execution. On the other hand, the EV fleet charging management algorithms allow the possibility of large-scale integration of electric vehicles on the grid and show the potential of EVs in contributing to the stability of the power grid by offering auxiliary services such as frequency regulation.

Part 2: Control of bidirectional charger for the electric vehicle

Electric mobility represents a significant transport technology for society, resulting in more efficient mobility. This transport technology is mainly supported by the electric vehicle (EV), where the batteries are charged from the power grid, arises the concept of grid-to-vehicle (G2V). However, it is possible to send energy in the opposite way, i.e., from the EV batteries to the power grid.  This operation mode is defined as vehicle-to-grid (V2G). A V2G electric vehicle offers reactive and active power regulation, load balancing, and current harmonic filtering. It offers also a wide integration with renewable energies, provides an electric grid stability and supports the balancing act between electricity demand and supply.  To enable power transfer in both directions between the grid and an electric vehicle, the battery charger system is needed with bidirectional power flow capability (figure 5). By investigating new control solutions, the aim of this part is to improve the stability of the DC bus voltage around a specified reference with a switching frequency included in a feasible operation zone of the bidirectional converter of the charger in both modes V2G and G2V.  

Part 3: Automatic generation of VHDL code for electric vehicle chargers

In relation to part 2, the two-way chargers use a lot of VHDL code. The goal of this part is to develop a toolbox that allows, from Maltlab / Simulink files, to automatically generate a VHDL code for integrating the control laws developed in part 2 of this second area of the chair on an FPGA target (figure 6).