International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 5, Issue 11, November-2014 152

ISSN 2229-5518

Performance Analysis of Hybrid Electric Vehicle

Battery Charger Using Voltage Oriented Control
Nagm Eldeen Abdo Mustafa Hassanain, Abdelaziz Y. M. Abbas, Mohammed Hassan Ahmed

Abstract — In this paper, a high performance battery charger is designed to charge the batteries of hybrid electric vehicles. The charger of hybrid electric
vehicle battery must be fully adapted to the battery to preserve the battery from damage and prevent harmonic current in the grid. Three-phase boost rectifier
(universal bridge) using diode and isolated gate bipolar transistor is used. It has advantages of Bi-directional power transfer capability and unity power factor
operation. The voltage Oriented Control method is used to control the DC output voltage. Matlab/Simulink software is used to simulate the mathematical model.
The DC output voltage with unity power factor is obtained.

Index Terms— Battery charger, hybrid electrical car, boost rectifier, voltage Oriented control
——————————  ——————————

control loop. But the quality depends mainly on the current

1 INTRODUCTION control strategy [11].

A plug in hybrid electric vehicle is a hybrid vehicle which

utilizes a battery to power the vehicle’s electric motor
[1].
2 CONVERTERS TOPOLOGY AND PRINCIPLE OF
OPERATION
A battery charging system is used to draw energy from the
grid, store it in a battery, and release it to the power device. In power electronic systems the rectifiers are commonly

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The charger must be fully adapted to the battery to prevent applied in the front end of DC-link power converters as an
battery from damage. The charger system needs to work with interface with the ac line power [12-14].
any kind of electric [2-5]. 2.1 Rectifier Topologies
The design of an outlet battery charger is not as simple as
connect the battery straight to the grid. The power charges As a consequence for problems of diode rectifier many
the battery must be within certain specifications to prevent new switch-mode rectifier topologies that comply with the
damage to the battery and overall system. In terms of plug in new standards have been appeared and developed to limit
Hybrid Electric Vehicle (HEV), the high- energy battery pack the harmonic content of the current drawn from the power
is to be charged with Power Factor Correction (PFC) from an line by rectifier. The aim of the paper is to develop a three
AC outlet. The most common topology for the HEV battery phase charger with unity power factor operation.
charger is the two-stage approach with cascaded, PFC AC-DC
2.2 Simple solution of the boost converter
and controller of the converter. In the PFC AC-DC stage, AC
three phase is rectified and boosted with power factor The topology shown in Figure 1 presents a simple solution of
correction. The output of the boost converter is connected to boost-type converter with the possibility to increase DC
the DC bus. The second stage controlled the output voltage of output voltage. This is an important feature of converters
the converter. giving maximum DC output voltage. The main drawback of
The charger system needs to work with any kind of electric this solution is stress on the components and low-frequency
car. The most important issues are the voltage level distortion of the input current [8].
differences of batteries between different electric car models.
The battery voltage can vary from 60 V to 400 V [6]-[7].
There are many converters topology method used to covert
the AC to DC [8-10]. In this paper three-phase boost rectifier
using diode and isolated gate bipolar transistor is used. It has
advantages of Bi-directional power transfer capability and
unity power factor operation. In order to achieve this voltage
oriented control (VOC) method is used. The VOC guarantees
Figure 1 Simple solution of the boost converter
————————————————
• Nagm Eldeen Abdo Mustafa Hassanain. School of Electrical and Nuclear
2.3 Rectifier Using PWM Modules
Engineering, College of Engineering, Sudan University, Sudan, E- Figure 2 shows topology using PWM rectifier modules with a
mail: [email protected],[email protected], ,
2TU U2T 2TU U2T

• Abdelaziz Y. M. Abbas. School of Electrical and Nuclear Engineering,

very low current rating (20-25%) level of rms current.
College of Engineering, Sudan University, Sudan, E- Hence it has a low cost potential and provide only the
mail: [email protected], [email protected],
2TU U2T 2TU U2T
possibility of regenerative braking mode with active filtering,
• Mohammed Hassan Ahmed, M.Sc. Student but the DC regulation is difficult [8].
high dynamic and static performance via an internal current
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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 5, Issue 11, November-2014 153
ISSN 2229-5518

active and reactive power. The reactive power q ref set to zero
for unity power factor.

Figure 2 Rectifier Using PWM Modules

2.4 Vienna rectifier

Figure 3 presents a three-level converter called a Vienna
rectifier. The main advantage is low switch voltage, but non
typical switches are required. It has high power density and
unidirectional power flow. It can also provide UPF [8].

Figure 5 Direct power control scheme

3.2 Voltage Oriented Control (VOC)

The Voltage Oriented Control is based on a series of
transformations from a three phase stationary reference

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system abc to a synchronous rotating reference system d-q
Figure 3 Vienna rectifier through a two phase stationary reference system α-β. With
these transformations, the control voltages remain constant
2.5 Universal bridge topology and become DC values, making all the control process more
Figure 4 presents the most popular topology used, and more simple. A closed-loop current control is used. A scheme of the
recently as a PWM rectifier [8]. This universal topology has Voltage Oriented Control is shown in Figure 6.
the advantage of using a low-cost three-phase module with a
bidirectional energy flow capability. Although, it has
disadvantages of a high per-unit current rating, poor
immunity to shoot-through faults, and high switching losses.

Figure 4 Universal bridge topology

3 CONTROL TECHNIQUE OF PWM RECTIFIER

The control techniques of PWM rectifier can be generally
classified as Direct Power Control and Voltage Oriented
Control.
Figure 6 Voltage Oriented Control scheme
3.1 Direct Power Control (DPC)
The Direct Power Control (DPC) is shown in Figure 5. It is These control strategies (DPC and VOC) can achieve the same
based on the instantaneous active and reactive power control main goals, such as high power factor and near sinusoidal
loops. In DPC there are no internal current control loops and input current waveforms. The DPC has variable switching
no PWM block, because the converter switching states are frequency and VOC has fixed switching frequency [8],[11].
By comparing both control method the voltage oriented
selected by a switching table based on the instantaneous
control is chosen in this paper because it has more
errors between the commanded and estimated values of
advantages than the other methods.
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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 5, Issue 11, November-2014 154
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According to the specifications of rectifier topologies and current measurements are transformed to DC quantities,
control strategies, the universal bridge topology and voltage then, a simple PI controller can give better results
control strategy has been chosen to simulate the battery The main qualities for dq‐frame current controller are:
charger. Boost rectifiers are built with semiconductors with • Fast dynamic response.
gate-turn-off capability. The gate-turn-off capability allows • Better accuracy current tracking.
full control to the converter, because valves can be switched • Less sensitive to parameter variations
ON and OFF whenever required. This allows commutation of The PI Controller block generates an output signal based on
the valves hundreds of times in one period which is not the difference between a reference signal and a measured
possible with line-commutated rectifiers, where thyristors are system output. The block computes difference signal for each
switched ON and OFF only once a cycle. This feature confers of the proportional [15].
the following advantages [10]:
• The current or voltage can be modulated (pulse
width modulation),
• generating less harmonic contamination,
• the power factor can be controlled, and it can even be
made to lead, and
• Rectifiers can be built as voltage or current source
types.

4 MODEL OF THE HEV BATTERY CHARGER Figure 8 Simulink of DC-link voltage controller
The model of the HEV battery charger used in this paper is
used VOC method. The main blocks of the model are: phase The ultimate goal of the PI controller is to obtain a desired
look loop, decoupled controller, PI controller, batteries and voltage in the DC-link. By measuring the instantaneous

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current controller. voltage and comparing its value with the value of the
reference voltage as shown in Figure 8. The error ε that is fed
4.1 Phase Look Loop (PLL) to the controller is obtained as follow.
The phase look loop is an electric feedback circuit consists of ε =v dcref - v dc (1)
phase detection, a low pass filter and voltage controlled
oscillator (VCO). It is capable of looking auto or synchronizes By implementing a PI control, a reference current for the
with an incoming signal. Its aim is to give the voltage angle of system, i d , is calculated as follow
the three‐phase system v a ,v b and v c . This angle is then used
ε
for all the dq transformations in the model. id* = k p ε + k i (2)
s
4.2 Decoupled Controller k p : Proportional gain of the controller
Figure 7 shows the decoupled controller block. The block k i : Integral gain of the controller
consist of current controller, Proportional Integral controller
(PI) and v dc link, and the output of decoupled controller is 4.4 Current Controller
v d * and v q *. Once a DC-link voltage control is established, the reference
current I* d , which is used to control the DC voltage, is
obtained. In addition, due to the unit power factor operation
of the system, the q-axis reference current I* q is set to zero.
To obtain these reference currents in the system, a current
control is performed, and the resulting of current controller in
a reference voltage is calculated in the dq-axis system. The
simulation of the controller is done for two PI control loops,
one for each component of the current I* d and I* q . The
outputs of the two PI controls are v* d and v* q
respectively as shown in Figure 9 [8]. The components of this
reference voltage are obtained using equations below [4].
εd
v*d = Ed − K pε d − ki + wLI q (3)
s
Where
Figure7 Decoupled controller (current and DC-link voltage controller) ε d = I *d − I q (4)
4.3 PI Controller εq
The PI controller reduces the error. The integral action
v*q = Eq − K pε q − ki + wLI d (5)
s
removes the error only if the reference value is constant in
steady state. Using Clarke and Park transformations, the

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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 5, Issue 11, November-2014 155
ISSN 2229-5518

5 HEV BATTERIES this research is to charge a high power battery. The battery
selected is the Lithium Ion Battery type [15].
There are many types of batteries used in HEV, Lead acid,
nickel-cadmium and lithium-ion. One of the primary goals of
Figure 9 shows the complete block diagram of voltage phase diode bridge rectifier. Consequently ripple in the DC
oriented control scheme, firstly the line voltage v abc need to voltage output is observed.
feed the PLL, and the voltage angle is obtained to use for
three-phase stationary to dq coordinate transformation of line
current and voltage. Secondly, the dq coordinate values and
the DC-link voltage value are used in a controller, the
controller compare these values using PI controller. Finally,
the reference voltages created by the controller are sent to the
PWM block to create the switching patterns S abc , (S = 1 means
switch ON, S=0 means switch OFF), to pulse the converter.

Figure10 DC output voltage when stop pulsing (uncontrolled rectifier)

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Figure.9 Complete model of the battery charger using (VOC)
Figure 11 Active power in (kw)(uncontrolled rectifier).

6 SIMULATION RESULTS
Based on the mathematical models, the voltage oriented
control of boost PWM converter is used to simulate the
battery charger and built in MATLAB/SIMULINK software.
The results are obtained for two DC reference voltages equal
to 200V and 300V. First, the results are obtained with
stopped pulsing which means that the converter worked as
the diode rectifier. In the second case the pulse is activated
and the boost PWM converter voltage oriented control is
worked. The results of the two cases are compared and
discussed. Figure 12 Reactive power (k var), (uncontrolled rectifier)
6.1 Simulation with stops pulsing:
Figure 10 shows The DC output voltage of the complete Figures 11.and 12 show the results of active and reactive
power during stopped pulsing. Figure 11 shows that the
model with stopped pulsing (pulses normally sent to the
active power has initial overshoot and then settled at 0.1s
converter are blocked). From Figure 10 there is initial
with a value of 115 KW. Figure 12 show that the reactive
overshoot for the first 0.01s. This due to switching frequency
reached. Then the DC‐output voltage decays gradually. At power is 25KVAR. This means that the system is not in unity
t=0.01s the pulses are blocked and the DC voltage drops to power factor, which indicates that this model generate
harmonic.
250 V. Also, it can be observed that when the pulses are
blocked, the models operation becomes similar to a three-

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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 5, Issue 11, November-2014 156
ISSN 2229-5518

6.2 Simulation of the battery charger when Vdc-ref =200V 6.3 Simulation of the battery charger when V dc-ref
When the system is under control and pulses are activated =300V
the DC output voltage is smooth. Figure 13 presents the DC Figure 16 shows the DC output voltage of the model, it has
output voltage of the boost converter using voltage oriented initial overshoot reach to 340V at the first 0.1s, then the DC
control when V dc-ref is set to 200V. The DC output voltage has output voltage is 300V, this means that the charger is fully
initial overshoot reach to 340V at the first 0.1s, and then the adapted.
DC output voltage is 200V. Therefore the charger is fully
350
adapted due to use of PWM scheme rectifier and VOC.
300
350
250
300
200

Vdc
250 150

200 100
Vdc

50
150
0
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5
100
time (s)
Figure 16 DC output voltage of the model when Vdc-ref =300V
50

0
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5 140
time(sec)

Figure13. DC output voltage of the model when Vdc-ref =200V 120

100
Figure 14 illustrates the active power of the PWM converter

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using voltage oriented control, at t =0.1s the active power is 80
p(kw)

15KW. Figure 15 shows the reactive power. It can be observed 60

from Figure 15 that the reactive power is equal to zero. This is
40
due to the use of PWM converter topology and VOC scheme
which is achieve the unity power factor for this system. 20

100 0
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5
time(s)
80 Figure17 Active power of the system model when Vdc-ef =300V

60
200

40
p (kw)

150

20
100

0
q(Kvar)

50

-20
0

-40
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5 -50
time(sec)
Figure 14 Active power of the system model when Vdc-ef =200V -100
0 0.05 0.1 0.15 0.2 0.25 0.3 0.35 0.4 0.45 0.5
time(s)
Figure 18 Reactive power of the system model when Vdc-ref =300V

Figure 17 presents the results of active power of the PWM

converter using voltage oriented control with V dc-ref =300V and
the active power has a value of 35KW. Figure18 shows the
reactive power and it can be observed that the reactive power
is zero, which means the system has unity power factor.

7 COMPARISON BETWEEN THE THREE CASES

RESULTS
Table 1 shows the results of the complete simulation model
when the pulses are blocked (diode rectifier), and the results
Figure15 Reactive power of the system model when Vdc-ref =200V of the simulation system using Voltage Oriented Control with
V dc-ref =200V and 300V. From the Table 1 it can be observed
that the DC output voltage using diode rectifier is 250V
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International Journal of Scientific & Engineering Research, Volume 5, Issue 11, November-2014 157
ISSN 2229-5518

because the system is uncontrolled, and the active power the [11] Sylvain Lechat Saunjuan “Voltage oriented control,” Chalmers
reactive power are 115KW and 25KVAR respectively, which University of Technology, Goteborg-Sweden.
[12] Krause, P. C., (1994) “Analysis of Electric Machinery”, McGraw- Hill,
means that there is ripple in the system. Also, Table 1 shows New York, 2010.
that the output active power when using voltage oriented [13] Harnefors Lennart “Control of Variable Speed Drives”. Applied
control is increased with V dc-ref is 300V than V dc-ref is 200V. Signal Processing and Control,” Department of Electronics,
However, the reactive power is remained zero which means Malardalen University, Sweden, 2002.
that the system is worked at unity power factor. [14] Mohan N., Undeland T., Robbins W. “ Power Electronics,
Converters, Applications and Design,” Second Edition. JohnWiley
& Sons, Inc. USA,1995.
TABLE 1
[15] S. Ogino and Y. Kimura ”Fuel Cell Powered Electric Vehicle”, EVS
THE RESULTS OF THE COMPLETE SIMULATION 13 Conference Proceedings, Osaka, Japan, second edition, 1996.
DC Active Reactive
Output voltage power power
(V) (kW) (kvar)
Diode rectifier (stop
250 115 25
pulsing)
Voltage oriented
control with Vdc-ref = 200 15 0
200V
Voltage oriented
control with Vdc-ref 300 35 0
=300V

8 CONCLUSIONS
In this paper the system model and simulation of the three
phase boost PWM converter using voltage oriented control

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technique is presented. This model is used as the battery
charger to charge hybrid electric vehicle battery. The
mathematical model is developed and Matlab/Simulink
software is used to simulate the model. The simulation results
have shown an accurate response to DC voltage
requirements. Regarding power quality, the system satisfies
the requirements and accomplishes a power factor correction.
The unity power factor is achieved by using PWM rectifier
topology and voltage oriented control VOC scheme.

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