The post-master designers program is a two-year salaried program in the field of technological design in Electrical Engineering.
To achieve a broader adoption of electric vehicles (EVs), fast-charging stations (delivering very high power) must be deployed in the charging infrastructure, which requires extracting higher peak power from the grid. This is not always available and can work out very expensive. Half the cost of a new charging station can be the cost of grid connection. This leads to a configuration using a local battery to reduce the peak power demands. We aim to use a novel alternative to a DC-DC converter, the Reduced Dissipation Converter (RDC) to integrate the local battery into the fast charging station: a cheaper solution that has much lower heat losses and requirements for cooling. RDC exploits a serial link between the local battery and the convertor and thus achieves high efficiency, high power density, high reliability at low cost.
To address the viability of the RDC concept and to mitigate potential risks, several research questions need to be addressed:
Techno-economic analysis of the different fast-charging solutions.
Optimized hardware design of the RDC with high efficiency, high power density, high reliability, and low cost.
Protection of the RDC and the battery under different fault conditions.
Control design of the RDC to achieve power balance, considering both steady-state and transient operations.