With the increasing popularity of electric vehicles (EVs), there is an urgent demand to shorten the charging time, so the development of high-power charging stations with fast chargers is necessary to alleviate range anxiety for drivers. The charging station based on the neutral-point-clamped (NPC) converter can bring many merits, but it has unbalanced power problems in the bipolar dc bus. To solve this issue, comprehensive dc power balance management (PBM) in conjunction with highpower three-level dc-dc converter based fast charger is proposed in this paper. The active dc power balance management (APBM) is proposed to assist the central NPC converter in balancing power so that the additional balancing circuit is eliminated; while the passive dc power balance management (PPBM) is proposed to eliminate the fluctuating neutral-point currents and to ensure the balanced operation of fast chargers. The principles of APBM and PPBM are researched, the efficient integration between them is studied, and the overall control scheme for the fast charger is proposed. The power balance limits of APBM are explored, while the circulating currents of PPBM are analysed. Simulation and experimental results are presented to verify the effectiveness of the proposed fast charger with PBM functions.Index Terms-dc power balance management, electric vehicles, fast charger, plug-in hybrid electric vehicles, three-level dc-dc converter.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.