As electric vehicles set out to compete with their internal combustion engine counterparts, cost and range anxiety are the two main factors limiting the speed of adoption.Even as transportation electrification becomes the norm in the decades to come, these aspects are expected to remain the significant drivers of consumer decision-making.
Electric vehicles require several onboard power converters, contributing considerably to production cost and vehicle weight, the latter impacting energy consumption and, ultimately, range.
Among the significant power electronic systems are the input three-phase and single-phase compatible onboard charger, responsible for charging the traction battery from an ac supply, and an auxiliary power module, responsible for converting power from the traction battery to the auxiliary low-voltage battery for powering subsystems, such as headlights and onboard computing systems.
This thesis introduces a topology that integrates these three power conversion functionalities to the dual inverter drivetrain with no additional active semiconductors and minimal additional passive circuitry.
Namely, three-phase onboard charging, single-phase onboard charging with optional active power decoupling, and traction-to-auxiliary battery power conversion are implemented solely with the drivetrain circuitry.
Implementing this diverse set of functionalities reduces the need for discrete onboard converters, materially improving vehicle weight and production cost.
To enable the aforementioned integrated power conversion, several theoretical contributions are included in this work. The mathematical model of the dual inverter with a split-phase open-winding machine is developed, explicitly describing all available degrees of freedom in the machine. A symmetrical design method for power converters eliminates the common-mode currents for nonisolated systems, enabling the design of standard-compliant onboard chargers. The power phasor and power space-vector concepts are introduced and leveraged to design an active power decoupling control for single-phase-to-dc power conversion applications. Lastly, the switching frequency component of the common-mode voltage between two dc links is controlled using carrier phase-shift between the inverters connected to said dc links.