Study of a Bidirectional Power Converter Integrated with Battery/Ultracapacitor Dual-Energy Storage

A patented bidirectional power converter was studied as an interface to connect the DC-bus of driving inverter, battery energy storage (BES), and ultracapacitor (UC) to solve the problem that the driving motor damages the battery life during acceleration and deceleration in electric vehicles (EVs). The proposed concept was to adopt a multiport switch to control the power flow and achieve the different operating mode transitions for the better utilization of energy. In addition, in order to improve the conversion efficiency, the proposed converter used a coupled inductor and interleaved-pulse-width-modulation (IPWM) control to achieve a high voltage conversion ratio (i.e., bidirectional high step-up/down conversion characteristics). This study discussed the steady-state operation and characteristic analysis of the proposed converter. Finally, a 500 W power converter prototype with specifications of 72 V DC-bus, 24 V BES, and 48 V UC was built, and the feasibility was verified by simulation and experiment results. The highest efficiency points of the realized prototype were 97.4%, 95.5%, 97.2%, 97.1%, and 95.3% for the UC charge, battery charge, UC discharge, the dual-energy in series discharge, and battery discharge modes, respectively