A Smart Adaptively Reconfigurable DC Battery for Higher Efficiency of Electric Vehicle Drive Trains

This paper proposes a drive train topology with a dynamically reconfigurable dc battery, which breaks hard-wired batteries into smaller subunits. It can rapidly control the output voltage and even contribute to voltage shaping of the inverter. Based upon the rapid development of low-voltage transistors and modular circuit topologies in the recent years, the proposed technology uses recent 48 V power electronics to achieve higher-voltage output and reduce losses in electric vehicle (EV) drive trains. The fast switching capability and low loss of low-voltage field effect transistors (FET) allow sharing the modulation with the main drive inverter. As such, the slower insulated-gate bipolar transistors (IGBT) of the inverter can operate at ideal duty cycle and aggressively reduced switching, while the adaptive dc battery provides an adjustable voltage and all common-mode contributions at the dc link with lower loss. Up to 2/3 of the switching of the main inverter is avoided. At high drive speeds and thus large modulation indices, the proposed converter halves the total loss compared to using the inverter alone; at lower speeds and thus smaller modulation indices, the advantage is even more prominent because of the dynamically lowered dc-link voltage. Furthermore, it can substantially reduce the distortion, particularly at lower modulation indices, e.g., down to 1/2 compared to conventional space-vector modulation and even 1/3 for discontinuous pulse-width modulation with hard-wired battery. Other benefits include alleviated insulation stress for motor windings, active battery balancing, and eliminating the vulnerability of large hard-wired battery packs to weak cells. We demonstrate the proposed motor drive on a 3-kW setup with eight battery modules.