Highly Efficient Bidirectional Series-Resonant DC/DC Converter over Wide Range of Battery Voltages

This article introduces a highly efficient bidirectional resonant dc/dc converter over wide range of battery voltages for vehicle-to-grid (V2G) capable electric vehicles (EVs). It operates as a pulsewidth-modulation (PWM) full-bridge series-resonant converter in the forward direction and a half-bridge resonant boost converter in the backward direction. One advantage of the proposed converter is that it has a wide voltage gain range in the backward operation. Also, it requires only six active switches. To achieve high efficiency, SiC mosfets are used for two bottom switches in the primary side, because only these switches suffer hard switching turn-off in both forward and backward directions. Since it operates with fixed-frequency and with PWM control, the magnetic components and passive filters can be optimally designed with respect to the volume and the loss. Thus, the proposed converter achieves low-cost, high-conversion ratio, and high efficiency over a wide range of battery voltages. Detailed analysis of the converter operation is presented along with the design procedure. A 3.3-kW/400-V prototype of the proposed converter has been built to operate for 250-415 V primary source voltages and tested to demonstrate its circuit design.