Sliding mode-based control of an electric vehicle fast charging station in a DC microgrid

Abstract

The fast-charging units have become a more efficient and attractive option recently for reducing the challenges due to the long charging time of electric vehicles (EVs). To evaluate the impacts of the EV fast charging stations (EVFCS) on the power grid and also to assess their contributions to the system operation through the vehicle-to-grid (V2G) technology, two control methods, namely, sliding mode control (SMC) and fuzzy logic control (FLC), are developed in this study for a DC microgrid including EVFCS and distributed generation sources. In these methods, the EV battery is used as a DC source of a distribution static compensator (D-STATCOM) with the objective of mitigating the voltage sag in the microgrid. Various simulations are conducted in MATLAB Simulink/SimPowerSystems environment in order to examine the effectiveness of the proposed control approaches in terms of ensuring the stability and improving the dynamic performance of the EVFCS. The results show that considerable improvements can be achieved, especially in the case of using the SMC method.