PV Based Off Grid Charging Station for Electric Vehicles
Abstract
To improve the utilization of electrical vehicles at remote locations and reduce the grid burdening in urban areas, an off-grid charging station plays a huge role. The off-grid charging station harnesses energy from renewable energy sources. Amongst all renewable energy sources, the photovoltaic(PV)cell is the best and suitable source of clean energy due to abundant availability of sunlight and installation of PV cells are easy and simple. However, PV energy fluctuates due to changes in irradiance as the position of the sun changes through the course of the day and therefore the PV Cells cannot produce constant energy. Therefore, an energy memory device is required to satisfy the energy demand and improve the sustainability of the charging station. Therefore, a system has been proposed here, which consists of an energy storage system along with the PV source and electric vehicle charger. The proposed system includes a PV Cell array with a boost converter, two bi-directional converters and an Energy storage system. The bi-directional converters are used for charging/discharging of the Electric Vehicle and ESS. The energy generated from PV cell array alone is not sufficient to meet the demand during the absence of or reduced sunlight.Thus, the energy storage system can meet the required demand when the output of the PV cell array is less than the threshold value. On the other hand, when the generation is more than the demand, the energy storage system utilizes the excess clean energy to make the proposed system stable. This results in a reliable off-grid, efficient and pollution-free Electric Vehicle charging station. The proposed system has also been implemented in MATLAB/ Simulink environment to verify the system performance.
