Bidirectional Three-Level Cascaded Converter with Deadbeat Control for HESS in Solar-Assisted Electric Vehicles

This article presents a deadbeat-based method for the hybrid energy storage system (HESS) in solar-assisted electric vehicles (EVs), using a new bidirectional three-level cascaded (BTLC) converter. Moreover, photovoltaic (PV) panels are also considered in the system, because the proposed method is designed for solar-assisted EV applications to achieve a longer driving range. The proposed BTLC converter can integrate the battery and the supercapacitor as an HESS to effectively mitigate the power mismatch between the PV power generation and the load power consumption for the solar-assisted EVs. The BTLC converter is superior to the conventional parallel-connected bidirectional battery/supercapacitor converters from the perspectives of related component size reduction and control flexibility. To regulate the BTLC converter, a deadbeat-based method is proposed, which can provide the proper power management for the battery and the supercapacitor, and maintain the bus voltage. The design and implementation of the proposed deadbeat-based method are analyzed in detail. A scaled-down prototype of the proposed BTLC converter is built for the experimental verification. The simulation and experimental results are presented and compared to verify the effectiveness of the deadbeat-based method for the HESS with the proposed BTLC converter.