Charging electric vehicles (EVs) from photovoltaic panels (PV) provides a sustainable future for transportation. This paper presents the development of a 10kW EV charger that can be powered from both a PV array and the three-phase AC grid. The goal is to realize a high power density and high-efficiency three-port power converter that integrates the EV, PV, grid and meets the Chademo and CCS/Combo EV charging standards. The EV port is designed to be isolated and bidirectional, so that both charging and vehicle-to-Grid (V2G) can be implemented. As PV and EV are both DC by nature, the converter uses a central DC-link to exchange power between the EV and PV, thereby increasing efficiency. The use of silicon carbide devices and powdered alloy core inductors enables high switching frequency and power density. The closed-loop control allows four different power flows: PVEV, EVgrid, gridEV and PVgrid. Hence the converter operates as a PV inverter, a bidirectional EV charger and a combination of both. A 10kW prototype has been successfully tested, and its experimental waveforms and measured efficiency are presented. It has three times the power density and higher partial and peak load efficiency when compared to existing solutions.

Grid connected PV inverters have a DC/DC converter connected to the PV for executing the maximum power point tracking (MPPT). The design of an interleaved boost converter (IBC) with three switching legs for 10kW PV inverter is presented in this paper. The paper shows how the use of SiC switches and powdered iron core inductors enables the operation of the converter at a higher switching frequency and increasing the converter power density. The IBC is designed using 1.2kV SiC MOSFET and Schottky diodes and KoolMμ powdered iron inductors. The design is compared with an IBC built with Si IGBT, fast recovery Si diodes and ferrite cores. The use of SiC devices reduces the switching loses drastically and there is no reverse recovery losses, resulting in improved efficiency. The higher frequency and higher saturation flux density of the powdered iron core enables the reduction in core size by three times. A 10kW prototype is built and tested for both the Si and SiC design and compared with theoretical estimations.Index Terms-Interleaved boost converter, powered iron core, photovoltaic systems (PV), silicon carbide (SiC).