Smart Emergency EV-to-EV Portable Battery Charger

Abstract

With the increase in the number of electric vehicles (EVs) and developments in their related charging infrastructures, consumers have still some concerns about some limiting factors in the EV industry such as battery life, charging station availability, electric grid capacity, limited driving range, and slow charging of batteries. Although some solutions are proposed for these limitations, they are not sufficiently efficient and cost-effective. Moreover, charging of EVs on-the-road is still a challenging issue which requires more innovation. This paper proposes a novel battery charger, known as an Emergency EV-to-EV Portable Battery Charger (EPBC), which provides a cost-effective solution for charging EVs on-the-road in emergency mode. The suggested smart charger can charge another EV based on the state of charge (SOC), capacity, and other important technical specifications of batteries in a safe and reliable manner. The smart charger can regulate the output voltage and the injected current to the EV simultaneously. To realize these features, a model free nonlinear integral backstepping control (MF-NIBC) is adopted to regulate the output voltage of the battery charger. By utilizing the actor and critic networks, a deep deterministic policy gradient (DDPG) is adopted to adjust the MF-NIBC controller. Finally, real-time tests based on the OPAL-RT setup are conducted to confirm the applicability and feasibility of the proposed EV-to-EV portable battery charger.