Investigation of Power Electronic Architectures for Solar Electric Vehicles

Solar electric vehicles (SEVs) can play a role in the move towards sustainable transportation, as a portion of the vehicle’s traction power is generated directly from on-board photovoltaic cells rather than relying on the generation mix of the local electricity supply for all charging. Other potential benefits include range extension, reducing charging load on the grid, and reduced charging costs. However, it is critical to design a highefficiency electrical architecture to maximize the solar energy captured. This paper investigates the efficiency and cost of two proposed electrical architectures for use in SEVs using four different converters. Detailed PLECS efficiency results are added to a vehicle model to investigate the efficiency during a real drive cycle with multiple solar radiation profiles. The results show that the best high step-up boost converter yields 9.9% higher efficiency than the best converter in the architecture utilizing the existing bidirectional converter results, but has 2.8 times the cost.