Research Projects

This project aims to develop an efficient high power density power converter for charging electric vehicle by utilizing GAN devices and planar magnetics. The EV charger power converter will be designed to achieve minimum number of components, less switching stress, and highly efficient control system with minimum losses. Wide bandgap (WBG) semiconductors, such as silicon carbide (SiC) and gallium nitride (GaN), exhibit superior physical properties and demonstrate great potential for replacing conventional silicon (Si) semiconductors with WBG technology, pushing the boundaries of power devices to handle higher blocking voltages, switching frequencies, output power levels, and operating temperatures. An intelligent digital based control strategy will be developed for proposed converter to charge an EV battery. Intelligent control techniques are useful to control the DC-link voltage and load current as well as achieve bidirectional power management, proper coordination of energy storage systems, fast tracking, fewer steady-state errors and high efficiency. Moreover, this project is also aimed to develop a battery management system which investigates the effect of charger configuration on battery life and it estimates the battery states such as state of charge (SoC), state of health (SoH) for improving the reliability of EVs and to improve the driving comforts. Further, an appropriate controller to enhance the robustness of nonlinear system and predictive analytical model to achieve good accuracy of SOC estimation will be investigated.

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