Grid-Connected Bidirectional Off-Board Electric Vehicle Fast-Charging System

Abdullah Haidar (), John Macaulay and Zhongfu Zhou
Additional contact information
Abdullah Haidar: Faculty of Science and Engineering, Swansea University, Bay Campus, Swansea SA1 8EN, UK
John Macaulay: Cardiff School of Technologies, Cardiff Metropolitan University, Llandaff Campus, Western Avenue, Cardiff CF5 2YB, UK
Zhongfu Zhou: Faculty of Science and Engineering, Swansea University, Bay Campus, Swansea SA1 8EN, UK

Energies, 2025, vol. 18, issue 22, 1-30

Abstract: The widespread adoption of electric vehicles (EVs) is contingent on high-power fast-charging infrastructure that can also provide grid stabilization services through bidirectional power flow. While the constituent power stages of such off-board chargers are well-known, a critical research gap exists in their system-level integration, where sub-optimal dynamic interaction between independently controlled stages often leads to DC-link instability and poor transient performance. This paper presents a rigorous, system-level study to address this gap by developing and optimizing a unified control framework for a high-power bidirectional EV fast-charging system. The system integrates a three-phase active front-end rectifier with an LCL filter and a four-phase interleaved bidirectional DC/DC converter. The methodology involves a holistic dynamic modeling of the coupled system, the design of a hierarchical control strategy augmented with a battery current feedforward scheme, and the system-wide optimization of all Proportional–Integral (PI) controller gains using the Artificial Bee Colony (ABC) algorithm. Comprehensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed optimized control framework achieves a critically damped response, significantly outperforming a conventionally tuned baseline. Specifically, it reduces the DC-link voltage settling time during charging-to-discharging transitions by 74% (from 920 ms to 238 ms) and eliminates voltage undershoot, while maintaining excellent steady-state performance with grid current total harmonic distortion below 1.2%. The study concludes that system-wide metaheuristic optimization, rather than isolated component-level design, is key to unlocking the robust, high-performance operation required for next-generation EV fast-charging infrastructure, providing a validated blueprint for future industrial development.

Keywords: electric vehicles (EV); active rectifier; bidirectional charger; off-board charger; Artificial Bee Colony (ABC); DC-link stability; multiple phases interleave buck–boost DC-DC converter (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: Q Q0 Q4 Q40 Q41 Q42 Q43 Q47 Q48 Q49 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/18/22/5913/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/1996-1073/18/22/5913/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jeners:v:18:y:2025:i:22:p:5913-:d:1791453

Access Statistics for this article

Energies is currently edited by Ms. Cassie Shen

More articles in Energies from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().