Sustainable electric vehicle charging using Active Clamp Dual-Stage converter and advanced energy management

Abstract

One of the major changes happening to transport of the future is the move toward the use Electric Vehicles (EVs) which is sustainable. The same is said about solar Photovoltaic (PV) systems which have risen from the pack to be one of the most significant technologies due to their ability to tap the practically limitless solar energy. This research is primarily about the design of a solar PV-based power generation unit combined with an EV system and a grid connection. A novel Active Clamp Dual-Stage (ACDS) converter is proposed that substantially elevates PV voltage. The system under consideration also implements an advanced Maximum Power Point Tracking (MPPT) method derived from the Improved Coot Optimized Radial Basis Function Neural Network (ICO-RBFNN) to attain highest possible power utilization from the PV system. A bidirectional DC-DC converter makes the energy flow between battery storage bank and local grid to be flexible and thus reliable EV charging is ensured at all times. Moreover, the Battery Energy Storage System (BESS) ensures that charging goes on smoothly when there is insufficient solar energy or at the time of a peak load, and also a three-phase Voltage Source Inverter (VSI) provides grid connection and deliver high-quality AC power. The validation of the research undertaken and the results achieved were done through MATLAB and this software indicates the efficiency of proposed system compared to state-of-art charging strategies. The proposed system achieves a conversion efficiency of 96.43% and a low Total Harmonic Distortion (THD) of 0.38%. Furthermore, the ICO-RBFNN MPPT achieves a response time of 0.18 s, a tracking speed of 0.10 s, and a tracking efficiency of 99.45%.